In an interview with The New York Times, Gary Schare, director of product management for Windows mentioned that he uses Maxthon and not Internet Explorer. I’ve been using Maxthon (formerly MYIE2) for a long time now, and feel that it definitely hasn’t got the attention it deserves. It’s a wrap on IE, i.e, it uses the IE engine, but, adds many amazing features to it. In my opinion it provides the best browsing experience. Yes, even better than Firefox. I won’t even go into the “but IE is insecure” argument here, because I believe simple precautions like using a good firewall, disabling ActiveX etc. should make that a non-issue. I am not a web developer and so cannot comment from that perspective, but, for the lay person who just wants to browse the web, the IE + Maxthon combination is excellent.
With Firefox market share increasing rapidly, I guess Microsoft will do something to stem the tide. Waiting for Longhorn to update IE isn’t an option, as it isn’t due for another two years. It would make sense for Microsoft to just buy out Maxthon and atleast beat Firefox on the features front. I’m sure such a move would slow down the mass exodus that we are seeing now. I think Firefox is a very capable browser and would have been using it right now had it not been for Maxthon.
Maxthon is free and can be downloaded from here.
Tags – maxthon, ie, firefox