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February 09, 2006
Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout Maxthon 1.5: A Plethora Of Tools
Other tools in Maxthon are valuable exclusives. Maxthon has the Simple Collector, which lets you select text or graphics and add them to a common collection bin for later offline perusal. If you happen upon a page in, say, Korean, Maxthon gives you an automatic translation link for Korean and 11 other languages, most of them two-way. I suppose it's possible in Firefox and Opera to concoct add-ins that display, with a single click, the local weather, your PC's file tree, Web-based bookmarks you can access anywhere, RSS feeds, and more. In Maxthon, they, and others, come installed and ready to use. Even when a feature in Maxthon is basically the same as one of its rivals', Maxthon takes an extra step in the direction of ease of use. Both it and Firefox have drag-and-drop, which lets you launch a search by selecting a word in the current page. Only thing is, Firefox makes you drag the word up to the search bar and drop it there. Maxthon lets you drop it anywhere. So Why Haven't I Heard About It?
This lack of big-time accouterments hurts Maxthon in a few ways, besides the simple fact it is distributed free (donations welcome). The documentation is lacking at times. And support is provided by fellow Maxthon users through forums. (Although, considering the state of professional software support these days, forums are looking mighty good.) I suspect being small and obscure has helped Maxthon become the powerful program it is. In my book, the most innovative software is always the concoction of a single person. Committees and marketing executives inevitably make for mediocre software. A marketing genius might have come up with a better name than Maxthon. (The "h" is silent.) But the best, gathered resources of American industrialism haven't come up with a better browser.
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