TechCrunch published an article yesteray about Maxthon browser. It strongly recommended Maxthon as an alternative to Firefox and Opera. Daily Om also reported recently that Maxthon crossed 50 Million Downloads. So what are Maxthon's strong points that make it popular?
Firstly, the features it offers. Tabbed browsing and built in RSS reader have become the standards of any web browser after Firefox's success. Maxthon has these, and more. Tabbed browsing is a lot easier in Maxthon. Tabs can be given a "Sticky" short name to page titles, so that when having something like 20 tabs open at a time, one doesn't have to fish out too much. Tabs can be aligned too.
Also, Maxthon requires fewer Extensions than Firefox. Built in Flash support, right click enabled almost everywhere, a customizable Utility manager on the toolbar for easy access of frequently used Computer utilities such as Notepad, URL aliases - something that can be done in Firefox by installing an extra extension to use a short URL. Most of the features require no extensions to be installed.
But many of the ready to use features make it look clumsy as opposed to the sleek elegance of Firefox, which is, by the way, a lot faster than Maxthon. Also, in terms of Searching within the browser, Firefox is a lot less painful to use - albeit it requires a few extensions such as "Context Search" to be installed. Also, Mozilla's Mycroft Plug-in site provides more plug-ins that can be installed for searching within the website - apart from the standard Google, Yahoo, Amazon search, one can include BitTorrent, Answers.com and many other reference websites. Maxthon supports Wikipedia and IMDb, in addition to Google Search. Not much, really.
Atleast as far as browsers are concerned, more doesn't mean better. A lot of features that Maxthon comes packed with are not useful really. This is why I disagree with the TechCrunch article. Firefox's idea of "Provide some really useful features as a basic package, and let the users download extensions if they want more" is great because the requirements of each user vary. This article provides insight into various browsers. But there is no "the best browser"; Firefox 1.5 has its share of flaws (or "The Dark Side" as the above mentioned article refers)
Really, the browser wars will never end.
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