Maxthon

In early 2000, Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser in the world. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon after with a few, relatively minor fixes, and cemented IE's stranglehold on the Web browser market. However, this dominance made Microsoft complacent and today, IE6 is a below-average browser.

 

Unfortunately, most Web pages seem to like its Web engine as they do not display optimally on browsers such as Opera and Firefox. This is where the MyIE2 team has come to the rescue. They developed Maxthon, which is based entirely on the IE engine, but which comes with better integration of plug-ins, security fixes, and last but not least, tabbed browsing.

 

Maxthon supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1, and unlike IE6, it does it without too many problems and maintains stability. However, like its parent software, a genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially considering IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it. The interface is still good and it's relatively speedy when rendering Web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem.

 

Some of the other negatives include the fact that it is prone to crashing just like IE6, but in this browser, security flaws inherent to IE6 have been fixed. These flaws have naturally been carried over from IE6, as Maxthon uses the same rendering code.

 

Maxthon has a very simple yet effective pop-up blocker, which reduces the annoyance of pop-up ads, which seem to have a strong affinity for IE! Overall, it's a good browser, but is not in the same league as Opera or Firefox. Strictly for those who prefer IE-like Web page rendering.