Maxthon the Great!
With all the hype surrounding Firefox you'd think it was the Second Coming or something. I feel it is my sacred duty as a blogger to help balance the forces that seek to tip the balance of browser usage :). Firefox isn't that bad, the thing I don't like about it isn't the browser, but all the hype surrounding it. It's a freakin' browser, that's all! This has got to be the most over-hyped product I've ever come across. There's a quasi-religion around it; you dare not speaketh any evils about Firefox lest the standards zealots come knocking at your door and hang you by your gonads. Maybe I've just been reading too much anti-Microsoft spiel over at the Firefox forums but I just have to say something about the browser state of affairs.
Most people probably don't care what browser they use and most just use whatever's on their computer, which means you're probably using Internet Explorer (IE). Now if you're like me you probably love to try out new things, in this case new browsers. I've used the following browsers at some point in time: Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7, Maxthon, IE, SlimBrowser, Opera, and Avant Browser. After using all of them I settled on Maxthon. Wanna know why? Quite simply it combines all the features I'm looking for in a browser.
The main thing I want as a browser of the Web is to be able to view pages, I don't give a shit about standards. As long as a page looks good to me I'm happy. Of the browsers I listed there are really only 3 browser engines among them. As I'm defining it, a browser engine is the part of the browser that actually renders the page for you. It's becoming common for browser engines to be componentized; basically someone can develop a different exterior around the browser engine. You may or may not know that IE is a browser engine, the actual program called IE is itself a shell around the engine; Maxthon, Avant Browser, and SlimBrowser are all shells around IE. Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape 7 are all shells around the Gecko rendering engine. And Opera is just Opera :). I'm only going through this little lesson about browsers to make a point about why I like Maxthon. Because it is a shell around IE I get all the rendering of IE but with a lot of extra features that Maxthon provides. And for better or worse many sites just look better in IE, so by using Maxthon I get sites that look really good, and the goodies I love.
And the goodies in Maxthon are pretty much what you'd find in Firefox: tabbed browsing, popup blocking, ad blocking, mouse gestures, skins, and extensions. So with Maxthon I get the best that Firefox has to offer but with the benefit that pages that look best in IE render their best. Now you might hear some people exclaim that Firefox is way better than IE in terms of security. Well, maybe. You see, something a lot people fail to mention when it comes to comparing Firefox's security with IE's is that a lot of IE's problems can be simply turned off. Yes, you don't have to switch your entire browser to get a more secure browsing experience, you can just turn off the potentially troublesome parts. I don't know how this has failed to be mentioned. You have a problem with cookies on your computer? Go to the options in IE and block them. Don't like ActiveX, go to the options in IE and turn that off. Some of IE's problems are due to its popularity though. Hackers target the biggest payload, and with IE having about 90% of the browser marketplace hacking IE is profitable. If Firefox ever gets more popular it'll become a more tempting target for hackers too, and much of the rhetoric currently spewed against IE will be applicable to Firefox too.
So in conclusion, use Maxthon, it's cool :).