Maxthon Cloud Browser

[ykgoh]

Anyone tried this Maxthon browser from China before?

How secure is it and does it come bundled with a lot of spywares like other free Chinese software?

It seems to have a lot of features built-in (e.g. ad-blocking, screen capture) for an out-of-the-box experience once installed, compared to Firefox that needs to install add-ons such as Adblock Plus to do the same.

 

[12122012]

Anyone tried this Maxthon browser from China before?

How secure is it and does it come bundled with a lot of spywares like other free Chinese software?

It seems to have a lot of features built-in (e.g. ad-blocking, screen capture) for an out-of-the-box experience once installed, compared to Firefox that needs to install add-ons such as Adblock Plus to do the same.

hmm... i would stay away softwares from china due to their malwares...

u can try The Pale Moon Project homepage it's a slim ver of firefox which support windows only...

oh as for installing add-ons, u just have to do it once. u can backup your browser settings, add-ons,... to move to your new pc or after fresh install OS...

 

[ahwei91]

Try it yourself with the portable version ......

 

[ykgoh]

Try it yourself with the portable version ......

Took your advice and given it a spin today. I was a Firefox user before it. Here's my opinion about Maxthon Cloud Browser (aka Maxthon 4).

• No spyware or malware in the portable edition.
• It's much slower than Firefox for initial cold start, taking about 15 30 seconds to start, compared to 8 for Firefox for my PC. But page navigation and rendering is extremely fast/instantaneous using the WebKit/Blink rendering engine (0 to 0.25 sec) compared to Firefox's Gecko engine (avg. 0.5 to 1 sec).
• Page scrolling feels faster and smoother than Firefox.
• It consumes less memory than Firefox (~200mb vs. ~250mb). Maybe similar to IE?
• It has many features out of the box (e.g. translation tool, night mode, screen capture, RSS feed reader, adblocker, media downloader, notepad) which Firefox and Chrome have to rely on extra add-ons and extensions.
• However, it has no built-in PDF reader unlike Firefox and Chrome. Will only offer to download, save or open a PDF file using an installed PDF reader like IE.

Overall, I like it for the features and performance. It saves me the trouble of having to look for suitable extensions and add-ons post-installation (I often need to install Ad Block Plus and Google Translation for Firefox since I use them). However, its lack of robust security protection mechanisms such as sandboxing and phishing link filter against malwares, drive-by downloads and phishing is a downer for me. Furthermore, I miss a built-in PDF reader which FF and Chrome offer for quick preview of PDF files on the Web.