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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Scott Gilbertson kindly interviewed me for his article: More Firefox Bloat- Say It Ain’t So, Mozilla. I offered so much more than a single sentence to his original query, so I thought I’d pass along the discourse (and my own self-correction) here:

I’ve got Mozilla’s perspective as well as some outside open source people, but I was wondering if you wanted to offer a user perspective. Do you have any great Firefox anecdotes about RAM usage freezing the system or memory leaks or anything like that — end user oriented issues.

Heh. Firefox has always been plagued by memory leaks (at least, as far back as I can remember). Mind you, I’m nothing more than a casual Firefox user – having been a Maxthon advocate since it was called MyIE2.

Firefox didn’t take off because of its core stability – it took off because it was a decent enough alternative to a Web browser that had been abandoned (Internet Explorer). Didn’t hurt that it had “open source” karma, either. Some people love the simplistic nature of Firefox, but I’m one who believes that minimalism is a gigantic weakness.

The issue isn’t really about cluttering Firefox with more features that could slow it down and make it more unstable – the issue is in not fixing outstanding, documented, replicable bugs before adding more features to the core.

I was using Mozilla for years, and it never grabbed much attention. The Firefox project was timed perfectly – the world was pissed off at Microsoft, and looking for a valid alternative that they weren’t finding in Opera (at that time, shareware or ad-supported).

Personally? I don’t think Firefox is all that fast – nor has it ever been. ;) If Opera could get their UI act together, I’d take them as serious competition on the desktop. Then again, IE and Firefox are hardly shining examples of amazing interfaces…

“Heh. Firefox has always been plagued by memory leaks (at least, as far back as I can remember).”

Are there any specific issues you can think of?

Actually, let me kindly retract that assertion?

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html

Which isn’t to say that Firefox is not without its share of issues. I haven’t really seen it lock up on me any more than I’ve had Internet Explorer lock up on me.

I can tell you one thing: Firefox’s browser security implementation is far and away better than Internet Explorer’s. FAR and away. Whereas IE requires you to refresh the entire page just to download a file that you may have clicked on, Firefox pops up a dialog with a countdown timer.

Moreover, the Firefox model for plugins / addons is astoundingly cleaner than Internet Explorer’s.

So, why not use Firefox? Eh, I really like the way Maxthon has been for me all these years. Maybe one day I’ll switch. But not now. I don’t feel the need. Granted, I’d just as soon use Lynx than Internet Explorer 7 or below!!!

What are your views on the open source model? Does the fact that Firefox is buggy/leaks memory have anything to do with it being open source?

Personally, I love open source seven ways from Sunday. I use Miranda IM, which is an Open Source instant messaging client. I really only like using open source software for my Web operations.

The issue I generally have with open source software is the lack of a cohesive UI. Firefox plugins are all over the map. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I believe that Apple’s design ethic has made the world understand that you could have elegance alongside functionality.

Or why do you think the developers haven’t fixed the memory leaks and other issues you mentioned?

How many millions of people use Firefox? Can you imagine if each one of them wanted to see something different in their core browser? :) I think optimizations are continually happening, although I’d argue that the general UI in Firefox 2.0 was a step backwards (and I noticed that several Firefox enthusiasts agreed with me).

Are they just not listening or are there other reasons?

You can only pound so many nails at one time. To compete further, I do believe that Firefox must contain more “awesome” functionality out of the box. Otherwise, you’re having to run a browser with a zillion plugins – and none of them aware that other plugins might be running. You have a more stable program if said items are actually integrated into the base.

IE6 had a lot of problems with standards and other rendering issues, but there weren’t many complaints about memory leaks or fairly basic problems for day to day use (excepting security issues), why do you think Firefox was able to gain so much market share even when the browser really wasn’t even stable?

IE6 really sucked THAT much. People were ready for a change – and that was enough of a tipping point to steal mindshare. Microsoft screwed the pooch, but they’re not going to give up the ghost again.

It’s not just about standards compliance – it’s about raw speed and core functionality coupled with compatibility.

NOTE: I may need to clarify my earlier points on the speed of Firefox. I think, as far as page rendering is concerned, Firefox beats IE – hands down. Launch time for Firefox, however, has always been horrible. Moreover, I like Firefox on OS X more than I like it on Windows.

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