Not the way I surf the world

Somehow the Maxthon browser slipped under my radar until it was mentioned today by TechCrunch and Om Malik. TechCrunch gave it glowing reviews in February. I’m not quite as enthusiastic myself.

Using Spy++, I verified that Maxthon 1.5.2 uses the Internet Explorer WebBrowser control to embed the IE 6.0 browser within its tabbed window interface. That means that all of the “web page” experience matches IE, for better or worse.

On the good side, if you’re an IE user it automagically picks up all of your browsing history and favorites, to which it adds a ton of nice features. These include tabbed browsing, feed discovery, a built-in feed aggregator, and much more.

On the other hand, navigation seems to me to be noticeably slower than IE 6.0 (about 42% longer to load a previously unvisited page with lots of graphics and applets in my unscientific sampling), so I’m guessing they tied a fair amount of code onto the various events provided in the DWebBrowserEvents and DWebBrowserEvents2 interfaces of the control.

And if you’re a Firefox or Opera user, you’re already used to a lot of the additional features. I do like the way that you can tile the tabs in Maxthon, so you can read two pages side by side, which you can’t do in the Fox or the O.

The RSS aggregator resembles Sage in the sidebar. Like Sage, there is no indication of which feeds you have previously read, so you have to click on each feed to see if you recognize any new items. Unlike Sage, though, you can’t display the aggregated items for a feed in the main browser window. Instead, you have to click on each item, which loads the link page in the browser instead of the feed item content. Definitely not a tool for the blogomaniacal. They say they’re improving this, though.

Some of the Address bar resolution can be confusing, too. For instance, since Maxthon inherits the browsing history from IE, I had some local folders in my drop-down. Attempting to select them, though, launched a Yahoo! search for those terms. Definitely not what I expected.

Speaking of search, Maxthon has a nice search pane in the sidebar, but strangely the default searches are “Steady Search” — which I had never heard of before (apparently powered by Yahoo!) — and Amazon.com. I would have thought a more sensible default would be one or all of the big three (Google, Yahoo!, MSN). It’s cool how the results for each of the selected search engines are brought up in separate tabs, but at first I didn’t notice that, so all I saw was the Amazon.com results. Personally, I prefer the toolbar drop-down in Firefox.

Something as simple as closing one tab challenged me. Eventually I selected File/Close from the menu while cursing. Later I found that the “System Bar” contains the “X” icon that I was looking for. Odd to me that the “System Bar” is not visible by default.

Naturally, I had to run my famous Rat Race benchmark, and add my results for Maxthon to the table and the discussion of that topic. You may remember that the Rat Race is a web app that overstimulates the Ajax capabilities of the browser by issuing an Ajax request once a second (or as close to that as the browser and server can manage). Then as a completely unscientific benchmark, the user attempts to navigate away from the page and see how long that takes. After my basic page load test above, I expected Maxthon to be maybe a little worse than Internet Explorer, which it was (22 seconds instead of 16). Firefox did it in 5.

The HTTP_USER_AGENT in the HTTP header identifies Maxthon as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Maxthon; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”, and VBScript is supported in the client, so web sites can treat this browser just like IE.

As you would expect, Maxthon has the same problem with the td:hover CSS style that IE does — changing the background color only affects the text, not the whole table cell as in Firefox and Opera.

Rounding out my earlier comparison of browsers, in place of sessions and folders, Maxthon gives you groups, which are saved as files on disk or as URLs. You can then share a group across workstations. That could be handy.

Maxthon says it supports plugins, but the web site is pretty thin on how you actually write them. It will accept Internet Explorer plugins — oh joy. I love COM programming, don’t you? I’ll take Firefox extensions over that any day.

So, I don’t think the additional features are enough to drag me away from Firefox, and the performance penalty reinforces that inclination. Good luck with version 2.0, guys, but it seems to me that as long as you’re still building on Internet Explorer, you have a built-in performance ceiling.