February 09, 2006

Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout

Maxthon 1.5: A Safari With Room Service

By Ed Bott, Scot Finnie, Dennis Fowler, and Ron White

Courtesy of InternetWeek

Page 17 of 18

A Safari With Room Service
When you install Maxthon, it emerges on your screen fully decked out in an array of features and tools and conveniences, as if to say "We've anticipated everything you could possibly need for your surfing." It's like being on a safari with room service.

Maxthon endows its tabs with more capabilities, including the ability to add them to groups. (Click image to enlarge and to see the Image Gallery.)

Tabs are no longer something new in browsers (unless you're Microsoft). All the other browsers have them too, but Maxthon endows them with more capabilities. With Maxthon, you can rename, edit, alphabetize, protect, set for automatic refresh, and juggle the position of the tabs on the page. One of the best things you can do with the tabs is to add them to "groups," collections of pages that you feel belong together. So if you're doing Web research, the system lets you assign one group to, say, sites devoted to investments, another group to job hunting, still another to reference book sites, and so on, until you're able to call on a powerful, specialized scheme for whatever job's at hand. Opera does something similar with its "panels," but their existence isn't obvious and setting them up is awkward.

Almost anything you find in Firefox, Opera, and IE, you find in Maxthon, only in an industrial-strength version — sometimes in several versions. For example, all three of the other browsers have Google toolbars. Maxthon has a Google toolbar, and then some. A Maxthon plug-in modifies the Google results page to give you one-click access to the same search at Yahoo, MSN, and other sites.

Maxthon lets you simultaneously search, Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Alltheweb, Ixquick, Wisenut, Killer Info, and any other search engine you want to invite to the party. And that's just for general searches. On another menu, different engines are joined for specialized, all-out, simultaneous searches for images, multimedia, software, multimedia, news, and others. Maxthon makes it easy to roll your own combination of search tools.

Page 18: Maxthon 1.5: A Plethora Of Tools

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