It is a shame!
It is a shame because this browser
is not even in the lists
of the top 5 internet browsers,
when its really, really powerful!

I think the Maxthon team forgot
what made Maxthon 2 great,
and that was that it was packed
with usefull features by default
which were highly customizable.

I follow the development progress
of Maxthon 3 for about 2 years now,
and every end of the week they upload
a new version and its changelog.

It is still of bugs, missing usefull tools
and its half as customizable as version 2.

I didnt mind continuing using version 2
until version 3 had reached a desent point,
but the problem is that ever since
I installed the latest version of 2,
it had HUGE memory leak problems,
to the point of tabs crashing literaly every 5 to 10 mins.
I even tried rolling back to previous versions
but it was too late.
The problem persisted.

DON’T EVEN GO CLOSE TO MAXTHON!

Why 8 years then, you might wonder?
Well, its true that Maxthon in its 2nd version (its now 3)
had a lot of neat features that it came with by default
and I honestly didn’t think were available on other browsers.
It was those features that kept me to this browser,
even though the others were faster and more reliable.
Oh yeah,
I forgot to mention…

IT CRASHES LIKE 1930′s TEST PLANE!

If it wasn’t for its crashed tabs recovery list, every time you reopened it after a crash, I would have been completely un-usable.

Well it was a bit difficult,
but after 32(!) plugin installations on Firefox,
I get the same power as i did on Maxthon,
only now everything is faster, more reliable
and more customizable to my needs than even before!

As for the 3rd version of Maxthon,
the new engine does make it as fast as other modern browsers,
but what good is that when it lacks important features, and its less customizable than its predecessor?

And believe me,
the developers are taking their sweet time developing this one.
I’ve been asking for 9 months for them to make mouse gestures
as customizable as it used to be in version 2,
but that never happened,
Instead they prefer to solve problems,
like “compatibility with the webpage of the game Cut the Rope” when their browser is full of important bugs that need immediate attention.

The Bible talks about the gift of prophecy and how everyone should develop it.

Psychics get a bad rap but it is actually a legacy of mocking anything that doesn’t rely on big churches or big government to get its ideas. Every spiritual tradition talks about psychic abilities as a side benefit to the spiritual path. Try one, lol.

Why not set up a Love challenge? A million dollars to anyone who can prove that love exists and is testable, rather than an alleged process of consciousness… love can be an illusion, a myth and a snare. But for anyone who has experienced it, its reality is beyond question. When you’re talking about the so-called ‘psychic’, you’re talking about consciousness. You can’t test it. You can test for electrical charge in the brain etc but you can’t measure the subjective experience and that is what is at stake.

The more people become tuned to their own processes of consciousness by means of meditation, silence, experience (and i suspect the authors of this article have had no experience of life beyond the keyboard), they would need neither dubious psychics nor dubious rationalists to explain away their fears.

But then, compared to you, what would I know?

. Skeptics are so 70s.

My own daughter is all over the internet, very independent, but very spoiled in comparison. The difference is not the quality of the machine, more that one child’s family has little background in technology. It’s easy to forget the ‘digital divide’, and that there are massive equity issues in using technology with students from the outset. Simply allowing a laptop to leave school immediately causes problems.

It blows my mind that some schools are dripping in technology and support – and that others are supposed to deliver a National Curriculum which is billed as fairer. For example, a kid who has to hand-score their music project for the HSC, or use free-ware, cheap-ware is at a significant disadvantage if another kid has top-end Apple-ware that score’s it for them. Even if it saves the kid an hour, it’s still an hour of work. Equally, how is a teacher supposed to attain the same level of knowledge and skill in that application, and how is the support system supposed to match both expectations.

All this BYOD and 1:1 stuff looks good in the media, and has in some instances put technology into homes that otherwise would have none, but I have said for a long time – that computing is still a science, not a consumer right, or social-pill, and today’s computer lab has been in decay for years, both in terms of gear, and the curriculum that is supposedly teaching modern computing skills and knowledge.

Personally, as a parent, I have zero expectation that school will even attempt to give my kids the ‘knowing’ needed, let alone deliver it. I’m cool with that though, what I’m not cool with are teachers who fail to engage them with the traditional, more effective tools that they are apparently experts in. Ironically they seem to have no problem using Real Estate.com, looking up cheap flights, or buying things on eBay – or bombarding the HelpDesk with the same question over and over.

Thanks everyone for the comments. Keep them coming. This is an important issue.

The staffing limitations of the HelpDesk and the proliferation of more devices requiring support means that schools will have to rely on funding local support or the systems will grind to a halt, even with the benefits of Managed Servers, etc. As for the traditional hard-working Computer Co-Ordinator, I cannot imagine how he/she gets through the day as a teacher with all the other stuff getting thrown in the air.

If IT can’t deliver shared calendars, cloud based storage/backup and effective team communications like microblogging, then end-users will simply jump into Google Calendar, Dropbox and Yammer. Then you have to ask, “who are IT?” and “what do they offer?”

Great post Stu.

I suspect that we need more leaders telling effective stories about what we are trying to do in education. There are so many mixed messages that many cannot see a way forward.

I believe we need a philosophy that supports personalised learning and expects individuals to collaborate re: all manner of solutions. The technology must support this ideal of individualised growth. One size does not fit all. Pre-service training for teachers does not appear to be addressing these issues at all or even 1:1 laptop learning effectively. How many of the instructors at university have 1:1 experience or even a history of integrating technology into the classroom?

The Big System approaches to curriculum, assessment and accountability continue to grow and alienate many young learners. The past (pen and paper exams and factory models) reverberates in a present that makes schooling look very anachronistic. I suspect that a nation-wide analysis of absenteeism would reveal some disturbing trends.

An aside: some say that third party providers will be increasingly locked out after the LMBR is finished and the centralisation will be complete.