Maxthon is a web browser that not many Internet users know about or mention when they are asked which web browsers they know.
That’s a little bit surprising considering the 300+ million downloads the download counter over at the Maxthon website displays right now. Still, Maxthon is an underdog in the browser game that is dominated by Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera and Apple at the moment.
A preview version of Maxthon 3 was released by the company behind the product which gives an outlook of things to come.
Probably the two most important changes are the change of the rendering engine from Trident to Webkit, and the new design that looks similar to the latest version of the Opera browser.
Update: Maxthon has been updated regularly since the publication of the review. The most recent version is Maxthon 5 at the time of writing this update (March 2017).
Maxthon 3
You see the Maxthon 3 interface above, now take a look at how Opera 10.5 looks.
There are several similarities here; The menu button at the top left, the tabs that are placed over the address bar or a speed dial feature (called quick access page) when a new tab is opened by the user.
Key features of Maxthon 3 that are currently build into the web browser:
- Online Favorites Service: Access your Favorites content anywhere with Maxthon Online Favorites Service. The encrypted stand-alone Favorites file format can protect your privacy on a shared computer.
- Tabbed Browsing: All the web pages are arranged as tabs inside main window to ease your navigation.
- Mouse Gestures：Hold right mouse button and perform the gestures to access common features such as Back, Forward, Refresh and Close Tab.
- Super Drag&Drop: Type the keywords in Address Bar then press Enter to perform a search. Or simply drag & drop a keyword with your mouse.
- Ad Hunter: Ad Hunter can efficiently clean up the web pages by stopping Popup Windows and removing Ad Content Blocks.
- Fully Customizable: Plugins. Skins. Filter Packs. Multi-language
Maxthon 3 is provided as a alpha version currently. The developers state that the version is not feature complete and that it should not be used in productive environments.
The Maxthon 3 Download is listed in the Maxthon forum and on various software portals such as Softpedia.
Update: Maxthon 3 final has been released. It can now be downloaded from the main website.