It’s a bit like Firefox with wings!

It’s in Beta at the moment and does shut down once in a while but I like it.

Give it a good go. It’s a really nice piece of software. Ignore what the Firefox fanboys say. Try it out and make up your own mind.

I’ve used Maxthon from its first release and when I last experienced problems in the autumn I tested it on two different pc’s with different o/s’s with the same effect.

Its well documented on their forum and Tara who moderates there and as made many plugins freely acknowledges that maxthon 1x has tended to sacrifice resolving longstanding bugs in favour off constantly adding more minor features

Maxthon 2.0 is a new start but it too has struggled with bugs.

I don’t see Maxthon doing much growth in the US, because it doesn’t really offer that much more than IE7.

Sure, plugins can be an issue with major revisions of Maxthon, but my point is, you don’t need any plugins with Maxthon to get the user experience that otherwise requires a dozen plugins and the plugin merry-go-round of Firefox…

um, since ff2 it recovers tabs after a crash. it called session restore … http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/

Also re :”The ability to start Maxthon with my 6 always used tabs (websites) open and displayed right away is a huge time saver” – you can do that with Firefox. I imagine if they’re both being developed by smart people that a lot of the functionality would be mirrored like that.

My only reservation with it would be that Firefox is clearly a memory hog, but I can deal with that.

Perhaps Robert is using one of the releases that had the CPU issue?

The latest stable release is Maxthon 1.5.9 build 30, which shouldn’t cause any high CPU usage.

I myself am running Maxthon 2 Beta 3 without any hassles and that on an old laptop with win98SE installed.

Sure there are still some minor issues with Max2 Beta 3, but it isn’t called Beta for nothing. It’s a good and stable browser, much more advanced than any of it’s competitors. The only downside of Maxt2 beta 3 is the magic fill, the one in 1.5.9 build 30 works alot better. But I’ve heard that they’re working on improving it.

Overall I’d give Maxthon the big thumbs up and I have even got rid of Firefox alltogether!

Thank you for your response, and be assured that my remarks were not directed at you. As for your questions:

- Have you tried it on more than one PC and have you always had the same experience? Have you ever run it on a PC that’s never had the problem? Only on one PC. It did not happen right from the start, I think. At some point there seemed to be quite a number of malware on it, completely undetected by anti-virus and anti-spyware scans, but only visible in the startup list of Spybot Search & Destroy. It was re-booting all the time by itself. I formatted the disk and re-installed everything from Windows up. (Or so I think. Anyway, it wiped up my data.)

- Is your Windows installation up to date with all patches? Yes (XP SP2).

- Do you have all the latest drivers for every hardware component in the PC? No, and what is a hardware component anyway? I can tell my printer is one (I’m running it with the original CD-supplied driver), I’m quite sure my CD unit is one (the guy who mounted it in the shop must have installed a driver out of somewhere), but what other parts of the PC are a hardware-component-with-a-driver-needing-updating? I do not even dare to mention that of course I have never updated my BIOS, since I have heard that this can zap your PC for good if you don’t do it properly. And this is an old Celeron PC.

- Are the drivers Microsoft certified? I have not the slightest idea. I would not even know how to check.

- What Windows services are you running? What is a service? Would that be that thing in the task manager which is not an application? Would a list help?

- What applications are you running? Background: Zone Alarm, CA EZ Antivirus, Spybot Search & Destroy, Spyware Blaster, Ewido (anti-malware), Copernic Desktop Search. Maintenance: regular sweeps with C-Cleaner. Foreground: Microsoft Office and Maxthon 1.5.9 build 30 Unicode most of the time, and, occasionally: Twiddlebit Plan for Windows (very nice, cheap and clever British project manager, I recommend it), Microsoft Money, Windows Media, Real Player, Nero Express, plus I often evaluate different utilities and productivity software. I usually stream Naxos radio all day (great value if you like classical music or jazz). No games.

- When the Maxthon problem occurs, do you know what causes it and can you replicate it, or is it completely intermittent? Unpredictable and cannot be replicated. I have both a memory occupation problem (50-100 Mo with 6 to 12 tabs) and a high CPU usage problem (40% to 80% when the problem occurs; when it’s idle and trouble-free, Maxthon takes up between 0% and 4% of CPU-time).

I have un-checked the “free memory regularly” option, this being recommended by some users on the forum as a possible remedy.

Some users boast of having 100 tabs open, I have never been close to that. Seems that increasing the number of tabs and the number of hours used increases the likeliness of the problem to appear, but this is really just a feeling.

I have some other processes, apart from Maxthon, going wild occasionally. This seems to be an unrelated problem, as I have researched these processes, and found different groups of non-Maxthon users experiencing the same thing. One is a Zone Alarm process. Others are Windows processes, and it seems a known fact that they fire up at some point without any real justification. People out there say it’s a Windows bug, sort of. Some can be killed safely, some not. I have a dreaded svchost which zaps my Internet connection if I attempt to kill it. When Maxthon goes wild, I have to close it, then check it’s actually closed in the task manager. Often it’s not, and only killing the process will close the application.

Sorry for this long post. I don’t know if it’s relevant. Thank you for the forum thread: I have read it, and others. Actually, it’s the end of the first post on that thread which had me jumping up and down, when the poster unaffected by the CPU problem wrote “this has been going on for too long”… you can understand why.

I have tried all the suggested workarounds I could find in the forum. I have not attempted those who look too tricky for my technical level, and frankly there are some where I did not even understand what the guy was talking about.

By the way, what part of the world are you blogging from? I got here from the Maxthon blog linking to your post, but I haven’t found a single geographical clue…

Thank you for your patience.