Maxthon 2.0 Problems

Maxthon 2.0 is out of beta, and I still feel that it has a long row to hoe before it’s anywhere near as stable or configurable as Maxthon 1.x was for me. There are a few frustrations that keep me from recommending it over earlier versions. I’m confident these issues can be addressed quickly, but it really shows how Maxthon needs a VERY strong English developer working inside the code (cleaning up grammar, wording, features, etc.).

• SHIFT+CTRL+Tab dosen’t work.
• Seems to be a massive visual delay in tab switching when you use F2 or F3 to switch between them quickly.
• Tab bar view doesn’t work nearly as well as it did in Maxthon 2.x, despite the various settings I’ve tried. I can’t get the widths to remain constant – and even when I have Multiline Tabs enabled, it stretches the actual tab width and keeps the title of the Tab at a fixed length as defined by the settings.
• The bright yellow color for secure URLs in the address bar is headache-inducing, and not configurable in any manner.
• I have launched Maxthon 2.0 several times, only to have it randomly ask me to enter my login credentials – not having remembered them from earlier sessions, or having cleared them and forcing me to re-enter them before I can start browsing again. This is a great concept if it works – but it seems not to be working.
• I’ve had my toolbar icons and settings randomly reset order on several occasions. This is more than mildly frustrating.
• I went to customize my toolbar again today, only to have the application lock up and flash between the settings window and the browser window almost indefinitely before letting me control the settings dialog again (a minute later). Couldn’t decide which one it wanted me to focus on somehow.
• The new form fill manager is an improvement, fundamentally – but there’s virtually no management tool to port over and pare down my exhaustive list of forms and logins. This causes the entire browser to freeze for seconds whenever I store new login information. This is more than mildly annoying.
• Settings dialogs for most of my plugins don’t seem to work?
• Some advanced settings are still not working, as they’re greyed out in the options panel.
• Super MSA is an amazing feature – but you can’t enable it automatically, but only on a site-by-site basis. This is a half-baked feature, and one they should be pushing to finish.
• There needs to be a universal style sheet for sidebar plugins – because most of these plugin developers can’t design to save their lives. Contrast this with the elegance of the Maxthon Setup Center (a beautiful experience).
• The Float Button setting seems not to work as advertised. Which is to say, it doesn’t work. The old Floating plugin (community plugin) was far better behaved.
• The inline “Find” applet is woefully inadequate compared to its established predecessors (community plugins) from Maxthon 1.x.
• I really shouldn’t see Chinese content on the Maxthon plugins site… it’s a HUGE turnoff, and is going to lose you more people to Firefox. I can’t read Chinese, and the plugins are far less useful to me if there’s no English equivalent (or they’re language neutral).
• The skinning engine may have improved, but much like the Firefox community, there are few usable designs. I’m less perturbed about this, as the new default Maxthon UI is pretty slick (overall, as a shell).
• Tab shortcut doesn’t work between the address bar and the search bar. You have to rely on another keyboard shortcut (takes relearning rather than intuition).
• Right-click and scroll wheel do not show open tabs like they did in 1.x.
• CTRL+Q is a nice feature, but too slow to load thumbnails if you have a lot of tabs open.
• You can’t close tabs from the same site.
• I was merely restarting Maxthon from its icon and before the window showed up: “An error has occurred. Please send the bug report to us after browser restart. Fault address: 005075B3 01:001065B3 C:\Program Files\Maxthon2\Maxthon.exe.” I have no idea what this means, or why this happened. This has happened 3x in the past hour.
• Launching an empty browser (no start page, not even about:blank) seems to have window (UI) artifacts in the lower left and upper right corners of the window.
• Launching an empty browser (no start page, not even about:blank) shows “fav: Query Version OK.RemoteVersion 3,LocalVersion 3″ in the status bar. I have no idea what this means or why it’s showing up.
• Sidebar management is really wonky, as new sidebars don’t stack inline with existing sidebars if the sidebar is not already open. Instead, the user has to drag the new sidebar around until it docks and merges with the existing sidebar plugins list. Moreover, there’s no easy way of cleaning up the icons in some of these plugins (another major downfall when allowing developers to create anything without adhering to some set of standards or design elements).
• You can’t change tab switching behavior – CTRL+Tab should toggle between the two most recently viewed tabs.
• There’s (that I can find).
• The “Plugins Optinos” tab is not dynamic, so you must refresh the window after new plugins are loaded. Moreover, there are no sort options (Date, Author, Type, Alphabetical, etc.).
• You can’t uninstall or disable a plugin by clicking on its icon.
• When opening a new tab, either blank or a URL, it seems as though the current tab’s contents slide slightly downward and to the right before the new tab fully loads. It’s a visual side effect that seems to be a flaw.
• Favicon loading is problematic again – which was a bug filed for 1.x, but has returned with a vengeance in 2.0. Instead of adhering to the favicon defined by the current page, Maxthon 2.0 trumps it and pulls the root icon (if one is even defined there). This is a gross oversight.
• Open all links in selection while performing Super Drag & Drop is still not functioning.
• I keep coming back to the bugs in the Tab bar, but it’s really starting to annoy me. Instead of a solid positioning of tabs (1st tab is always in one position), it flips lines of tabs (in Multiline mode), much like you would expect it to do if you were using a Settings dialog. However, I’m not expecting this here – and I’m certainly not wanting this.
• In writing this list, my toolbar formatting has decided to reset itself once again (and I have to go in and re-add the tab management buttons that I had previously placed and right-aligned).
• Auto-Fit Tabs setting does not adhere to my Minimum width setting, and (again) causes usability problems when many tabs are open at one time. Seems they’re trying to make tab management easier, but have bungled the process.
• Despite setting Maxthon 2 as my default browser, some links (clicked from utilities like mIRC) are opening in Maxthon 1.
• In a browser that has an empty start page (and no other tabs open), new pages open on a new tab rather than the first (blank, empty) tab.

They have quite a few things to work on here, and I don’t know where their priorities happen to lie – or how many developers they have actively working on these issues. Not sure if they’re short-staffed, or seemingly don’t understand that these problems take away from the overall experience in what they’ve assembled in a browser.

I will make myself available to any and every Maxthon core or plugin developer to help make this a better experience for everyone.

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