Maxthon Browser -- The IE Engine Supercharged

When I wrote about the new Internet Explorer 7 last Friday, I complained that I could not find an ad blocker for it. A Software Gadgets reader emailed me and suggested I try Maxthon. Formerly known as MyIE (I used MyIE years ago), Maxthon uses IE's HTML engine to display sites, but wraps it with a different user interface -- and it comes with an ad blocker that works something like the Ad Blocker Plus extension for Firefox. I downloaded the latest version of Maxthon and gave it a spin.

According Maxthon's home page, it includes a number of additions to IE including:

* Mouse Gestures
* Super Drag&Drop
* Privacy Protection
* AD Hunter
* IE Extensions Support
* External Utility Bar
* Skinning

I took Maxthon for a spin and found it lives up to its claims. The interface is a bit busy, but it adds a lot of nice features to IE -- even IE 7. Most importantly for me, the ad blocker works. I can't cruise the net without the ability to block the more annoying ads. I don't block them all, but if they try to track me around the net, block my view of the web page, make noise, or otherwise act annoying to try to get my attention, they get my attention long enough to block ads from that ad server/ad company.

Maxthon's tabs are a bit more polished than those of IE 7 and Maxthon seems to use a bit less memory than IE 7 (which means far less than Firefox). Maxthon can use some major IE Plugins and even has several hundred Maxthon plugins -- something like Firefox extensions -- although IE 7 seems to a broken some of them. The Maxthon web sites lists a number of other minor features Maxthon provides out of the box, such as, Page Zooming, Simple Collector, Web Services, Password protecting Tabs, URL Aliases and many others.

I like Maxthon. Not enough for it to replace Firefox as my primary browser, but it has already replaced Internet Explorer for those times I just have to use IE on some web site or another. Maxthon is just a better IE than IE.

Rating: 5.0
Operating System: Windows 98+ with Internet Explorer 5.5+
License: Commercial Freeware
Price: Freewar
Version: 1.5.8 build 116
Web Site: http://www.maxthon.com/

[tags]Maxthon Browser, Internet Explorer, Web Browser, WWW[/tags]