The Real Firefox-Killer

Life Technology
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Firefox, which I use and heartily endorse, may have some stiff competition from across the straits. Very interesting development - MAXTHON
(news from a Linnux site)

[quote]The Real Firefox-Killer
The Real Firefox-Killer
By Glyn Moody on Wed, 2007-01-03 03:37.

Firefox fans will be facing 2007 with more tranquillity than they did 2006. A year ago, it was clear that Firefox’s free ride was about to end: after an astonishing five years of inactivity, Microsoft was finally launching an updated version of Internet Explorer. There seems little doubt that much of Firefox’s success is down to the fact that Internet Explorer was so bad, both in terms of the eternal round of security problems and its general technical tiredness (half a decade is a very long time in computing.)

Potentially, them, the appearance of Internet Explorer 7 could have marked the high-water point for Firefox, as the Microsoft machine went into overdrive and began clawing back the market share it had lost since Firefox’s arrival. But when the final version of Internet Explorer 7 appeared in October last year, the verdict was almost unanimous: it was not a Firefox-killer. To be sure, it was much better than IE6, but that had set the bar pretty low. Aside from offering tabs and a few much-needed security enhancements, IE7 was definitely in the ho-hum category. Firefox seemed safe for at least another year or two.

It is not. For the real challenger comes not from Microsoft directly; instead, it’s from a new browser that uses IE’s rendering engine, Trident, but which is produced completely independently of the company. This means that it can offer all the “benefits” of 100% compatibility with what is still the dominant Internet browser, together with a host of real improvements - some of which go beyond even Firefox.

This new competitor is called Maxthon, and, significantly, come from China. This is relevant because the Chinese computer sector has tended to evolve according to its own rules. So while many sensible Westerners have seen the light and converted from Internet Explorer to Firefox, this is by no means the case in China. On the contrary: according to a recent interview with one of Maxthon’s executives, Maxthon holds around 30% of the Chinese browser market, while Firefox is nowhere. Put that figure together with the fact that there are currently 132 million Internet users in China, up 30% from last year, and likely to grow even more in the future, and you have a situation where Maxthon’s installed base probably already rivals that of Firefox. (more at link)
linuxjournal.com/node/1000159[/quote]

The MAXTHON site:
maxthon.com/index.htm

I’m interested in coments from the tech geeks on here about this browser.

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[quote=“TainanCowboy”]The MAXTHON site:
maxthon.com/index.htm

I’m interested in coments from the tech geeks on here about this browser.[/quote]

I don’t really qualify as a tech geek, but as they don’t have a Mac version I can’t try it anyway. It’d have to be good to get me to switch from Firefox though…

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If Maxthon wants to make headway in the West, it needs to have something that makes it worth migrating from Firefox, as Taffy said.

There’s nothing new about their basic idea - people have been building “browsers” over the IE rendering engine for a long time. AOL were doing it back in the 90’s – with tabs, even!

Looking at Maxthon’s feature list, there are a few good ideas. One is “User Interface Multi-Thread technology”, which might well reduce crashes caused by webpages, although the nature of multithreading is that it will introduce thousands of obscure new bugs of its own.

They talk about “Modular design” and interface skinning, but don’t make it clear how much the actual behaviour of the program can be customised. One of the best things about Firefox is the extension system, which allows extensions to get right into the guts of both the browser and the web pages it displays, so that I can have extensions to, say, improve Javascript debugging support and modify hidden values in fields (necessary when writing web sites).

Other features they mention are actually fairly common, but unknown because no-one gives a damn - mouse gestures are a good example. Both Windows and Linux (gnome, at least) have built-in support for mouse gestures, but no-one actually uses them. Same goes for the “multi-proxy function” (perhaps more relevant in China!), “super drag and drop” (whatever the hell that means), and skinning (which only 14-year-old girls care about, and they don’t install browsers).

The Maxthon interface is just bad:

Look at all those icons! The whole screen is packed with them. What do they all do? Will I really use them all often enough to have icons taking up screen space? Why are the tab labels using alphabetic characters from a Chinese font? That’s lazy coding. Why are there four different buttons to control tabs, which I assume mean “detach, minimise, cascade, and close”? What does it mean to minimise a tab? Does anyone ever actually cascade their windows? (Hint: No.). Why isn’t “detach” a context-menu option? Why is the close button not attached (or even spacially related to) the tabs?

Meanwhile, the features of Firefox which will keep it strong in the next few years are things which haven’t really started being exploited yet. SVG canvases (Scalar Vector Graphics) are a very big one. Javascript 2.0 support. Real UI components (via chrome) for use in webpages, so that you can build a web app that looks and behaves like a native system app. IE7 mostly doesn’t have those things, and so neither does Maxthon. Nor can they add it, since hacking on the IE7 renderer is just wildly impractical.

In summary … meh.

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[quote]…the real challenger comes not from Microsoft directly; instead, it’s from a new browser that uses IE’s rendering engine, Trident, but which is produced completely independently of the company. This means that it can offer all the “benefits” of 100% compatibility with what is still the dominant Internet browser, together with a host of real improvements - some of which go beyond even Firefox.

This new competitor is called Maxthon, and, significantly, come from China. This is relevant because the Chinese computer sector has tended to evolve according to its own rules. So while many sensible Westerners have seen the light and converted from Internet Explorer to Firefox, this is by no means the case in China. On the contrary: according to a recent interview with one of Maxthon’s executives, Maxthon holds around 30% of the Chinese browser market, while Firefox is nowhere. Put that figure together with the fact that there are currently 132 million Internet users in China, up 30% from last year, and likely to grow even more in the future, and you have a situation where Maxthon’s installed base probably already rivals that of Firefox.[/quote]Interesting. Not sure whether “one of Maxthon’s executives” is the most reliable source for the 30% figure, but even half that would still be a lot of users.

It may just be a case of the right marketing at the right time, though. There are a number of IE-based browsers around, as well as various Mozilla-based ones. And there’s Opera, too, which is still quite good and has some advantages over Firefox (well, Firefox in its standard, unenhanced form anyway).

And I’m not sure that 100% compatibility with IE is a good thing.

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I think FF still has it beat.
From what I’ve read its big draw in the PRC is its proxy thing which lets folks avoid the commie censorship thing over there.

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It doesn’t work on my machine; therefore, it sucks.

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well… there’s a new IE (installed at work) with the tabbed browsing which all you firefox users rave about… yech! pass! i’ll stick with this please… i just can’t get used to those tabs… now i have tabs up top AND down the bottom…

btw. it’s kinda bugged too… sometimes it’ll open a new window as a tab, sometimes as a new IE~ o_O

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I still prefer lynx.