Maxthon 3.4

By Michael Muchmore

There's a new browser in town, and it's toting some pretty impressive firepower. In fact, Maxthon has been around for nearly a decade, but it will probably be new to most who read this. Maxthon 3.4 is not only the most feature-rich browser you'll find, but its speed and standards compatibility levels are eyebrow-raising. Want to capture video playing inside the browser or grab a screenshot, Maxthon has the tools. Want syncing of tabs, bookmarks, and even notes? You guessed it, Maxthon can do it with built-in tools. Sick of bright white webpage backgrounds burning out your eyes? Maxthon's night mode can come to your rescue. You don't have to worry about a site being incompatible with the maverick browser, either, since it includes both Google Chrome's and Internet Explorer's underlying webpage rendering engines.

Interface
By default, Maxthon's interface isn't as sparse as those of the current browser crowd. But it has a few brilliant touches, and as you use it you'll discover more and more as you go along. A rail along the left gives access to Favorites, Downloads, Feeds, SkyNotes (more on that later), and Tab sync. But you can add extensions to this rail, such as a Facebook sharer, a Twitter tweeter, shopping assisters, and games. I didn't see an ad blocker in Maxthon's own extension gallery, but third-party Maxthon extension sites offer them.

To the left of the tabs along the very top, you'll see a large blue smiley-face button, which accesses the program's large main menu dialog. The smiley turns into your own user picture when you create a syncing account with Maxthon, making for a truly personalized browser. And the personalization goes even further: The Skins feature lets you radically customize the browser's border, tabs, and buttons, with hundreds of choices ranging from cute kid-style themes to polished metal looks. It's a lot more power over the look of your browser than you get with Chrome or IE. Installation of skins is quick and restart-free, and once you've downloaded one, it's available from a button on the browser border.

Tabs
Maxthon's tab implementation is actually a weak spot: I couldn't rip a tab out to create a new browser window, as I could with every other major browser. And forget about Opera 12's tab previews or IE, Chrome, and Firefox's tab-pinning. Another minor inconvenience is that you can't close a tab unless it's the active one. But the browser does offer a unique split-screen view that shows two tab contents side by side. A button dropdown lets you close or refresh all tabs at once.

Maxthon's new-tab page is every bit as useful as that of any other browser, save possibly Opera's, which offers live updated mini apps. In Maxthon, you can move the link tiles around on the grid to taste, and add any sites you want (Chrome only puts your most-visited sites on the tiles.) Maxthon also lets you choose a background either from stock art you're your own images. And you can sync the tiles with your other Maxthon installations or hide them for a blank white page. When I tried syncing, however, each tile on the second PC showed my present above the default tile, and didn't link to my choice.

Extras
Now for the fun stuff: As I mentioned at the outset, Maxthon comes more stocked with goodies than any browser you're likely to encounter. Traversing around the edges of the browser window reveals these. I already mentioned the Extensions bar on the left, but some of the cooler features lurk in the toolbar button at top right and in the lower-right border.

A highlight among these perks is the Resource Sniffer, accessible from the toolbar. Go to any page that contains video, music, or photos, and the Resource Sniffer can download it all for you. But when you're on a page with video with Sniffer enabled, the movie plays in a separate Maxthon video window, which can be annoying and hard to dismiss. And on a page that offered MP3 downloads, the Sniffer didn't show any audio files available. I was however able to download videos from all the major video sharing sites.

Other nifty options in the toolbar include Magic Fill?pretty a multi-account password manager; Snap, which grabs a screen capture of either the whole browser or an area you select with a cross-hairs; Feed Reader, which can display RSS and Atom feeds nicely; and SkyNote, which lets you jot down text that will be available from other devices running Maxthon. The toolbar also gives access to frequently needed Windows items like My Computer, Paint, Calc, and you can even add any program to run from the External Tools button.

A favorite Maxthon trick of mine is Night Mode, which darkens bright interfaces?it even lets you choose text and background colors?for any site. Akin to this is the Mute button at the bottom in the status bar, which makes sure you won't be disturbed by noisy auto-playing sites. You can also set the status bar to display your upload or download speeds, CPU usage, and IP address.

Like Safari, Maxthon offers a "reading view" for text-heavy webpages. This eliminates distracting ads and images. When you arrive at a suitable page, a book icon appears in the address bar, and clicking this presents a clean white page of text. Another cool visual tool is the "telestrator": Holding down the right mouse button, you can highlight an area on any Web page.

One extra you don't get in Maxthon (but do in Opera) is a built-in BitTorrent client. Nor, for that matter, will you get Opera's Turbo Mode, mail client, or Speed Dial apps. Like Opera, Maxthon allows mouse-gesture input, for example, letting you navigate back by holding the right button and clicking on the left one. ?Use Maxthon for a while, and you'll likely find even more hidden treasures.

Syncing and Start Page
Maxthon by default starts up with a pretty useful start page, showing links, news, search, and popular videos. You can customize to the hilt, with your own links and location. I mentioned that you can use Maxthon's Cloud Sync to synchronize notes on any computer or device you use to log into Maxthon; you can do the same for bookmarks, options, the address bar, new-tab links, and Magic Fill passwords. A separate extension enables tab syncing, too.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/MLjCqR9ysyA/0,2817,2408060,00.asp

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