An IE-Based Tabbed Browser from China

wannabgeek writes "CNET reports that a new browser, Maxthon is gaining wide popularity in China. 14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it ... Part of the reason, it has features that help in circumventing the Chinese government censors. CNET says it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, and is slowly gaining foothold in Europe as well as the U.S."

them pesky dogs

[Bananatree3]

Apperently the Shinese dog breed have taken over the government of China [dogbreedinfo.com] Hopefully they will be kind to their previous masters.

New browser?

[transwarp]

Maxthon hasn't been new for a long time. In fact, the only thing in the article I hadn't heard a million times already was that it's made by a Chinese company. And this "parallels" feature they're working on--sounds like MDI.

A new browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maxthon's been around for years. It used to be called MyIE.

Maxthon, Not New

[Webz]

Maxthon isn't all that new. Long time users know it as MyIE2.

If you've ever wondered what a browser with an IE-engine and tabs that didn't suck is like, try Maxthon. It's really lightweight.

For development purposes and sometimes just pure speed (IE feels faster than Firefox sometimes), I keep a copy on my machines alone Firefox.

Re:New browser?

[TheSpoom]

Amen, tagged this 'oldnews' as soon as I saw it. I remember seeing this browser at least a year ago. I'm pretty sure they just use the IE ActiveX control; from there, you can pretty much do anything. Tags would seem (on first glance, without doing any research) to be pretty trivial to implement.

It's been known to be safer than IE

[baadger]

On occasion the authors of Maxthon have hacked in third party protection against zero day exploits. I can't be arsed finding the reference, but I thought i'd mention it since this is such an uninteresting news post.

Re:So what, it's windows only...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot.

With that out of the way, Opera doesn't use any part of IE at all. Hell, it barely even uses Windows libraries, since the UI is built using Qt.

Opera uses as much IE as Firefox uses IE: practically none. (Practically because some people might consider opening downloaded files in the Windows shell to be part of IE - namely Microsoft lawyers when trying to prove that IE is a core part of Windows.)

Re:So what, it's windows only...

[bunions]

just for completeness: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html [tatanka.com.br] Explore all your internets from loonix. Works pretty well, except tooltips show up as fully-decorated windows.

This isn't new...

[Mark LeMunyon]

Maxthon is not new, and it's not a browser iteself. Its just a shell for IE.

Maxthon can use Gecko as well?

[aymanh]

It looks like Maxthon isn't entirely IE-based, its Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] suggests that it can use the Gecko engine as well (which is the same rendering engine used by Firefox):

Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) (pronounced "max-ton") is a freeware browser. It uses Trident, the same layout engine used by Internet Explorer as its default layout engine, but can use the Gecko technology used in Mozilla Firefox as well.

Re:New browser?

[kukyfrope]

I use Maxathon on my computers with tiny amounts of RAM, like my old 866mhz 128mb machine that runs WindowsXP. I've got a minimalistic install of WindowsXP on it and use it for only browsing the web. Firefox was too slow on that machine with how many tabs I like to open up, yet with Maxathon I had open 30 tabs and in task manager, it was only using about 15-20mb of RAM.

The main pitfalls of the app are it's still based on IE so the DOM Firefox support isn't there, and while Maxathon has an "AdBlock" like feature, Firefox's is cleaner and collapses the page where graphics previously were, while Maxathon keeps the ad space open and blank. And it still isn't great about handling file opening (torrent especially).

Overall it's a great little browser and on old machines I can live with its few features I wish worked differently in exchange for super low memory usage.

Re:The poor man's IE7

[n101]

It works fine with the IE7 core too, so it's as security as IE is. Most (if not all) features that IE7 has will be added to Maxthon 2.0, which will probably be out before IE7.

It can also use Gecko

[Zarel]

It used to be called MyIE2, not MyIE. It also has the ability to use Gecko (the Firefox rendering engine), too. I'm surprised no one's brought that up yet.

Re:avant browser

[Ant P.]

Firefox can be [mozilla.org] an IE shell too, you know.