Maxthon’s Cloud Browser Sets You Free

For a company whose name most people don't know, Maxthon can make some lofty boasts about the latest version of its Cloud Browser 4.2. "10 percent faster than Chrome" and top HTML5 support are among these claims. Aside from these core technology feats, Maxthon has long impressed me with the number of extra helper features it offers. Not only are there tools for consuming Web content, like its resource sniffer, screen capture tool, and eye-saving "night mode," but an ancillary Web service also lets you download directly to cloud storage rather than clogging your local disk drive. On top of all this, Maxthon's original interface design gets out of the way of your site browsing.

Maxthon has for a while been a distinctive entry among the common run of browsers. Its clever user interface resembles the clean look of Windows 8 and it offers a raft of tools for getting the most out of the Web. In a world dominated by Internet Explorer, Chrome, andFirefox, let's see whether Maxthon has what it takes to entice users away.

InterfaceOne of the most striking things about the look of this browser is that it dispenses with the standard window border and minimize, resize, and exit buttons at top right. Oh, they're there, but only when you move the mouse over the vestigial, truncated, non-distracting buttons that have replaced the standard ones. Though small touch, it's an innovative UI idea that removes distraction.

Another brilliant touch is that the search box enlarges when you click in it, so that normally the page address has more space. There are just six toolbar items, but you can still get to lots more functions from a dropdown menu accessible from the list icon on the top right.

A placeholder smiley face button graces the top-left corner of the window; clicking this takes you to a login dialog for Maxthon Passport, which changes the smiley to your user photo and adds easy access to social networks. Below your user pic is a narrow sidebar column of buttons for Favorites, Downloads, RSS feeds, and Sky Notes (more on these in a bit). You can add to this button sidebar using extensions.

As with Firefox, Maxthon keeps the search box separate from the address box—a privacy advantage, since the address+search box combination sends every URL you enter to the search provider. As with any browser these days, if you type something in the address box that's not a URL, you can still search or see matching favorites or history if you enable this in settings. This is clearly displayed on page, with result highlighting.

Cloud Syncing and the Start Page:

Maxthon has the ability to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, options, the address bar, new-tab links, and Magic Fill passwords among all Maxthon instances on computers and mobile devices you're logged into. You can also sync notes, a feature the company calls "SkyNote."

Cloud download and Push are a couple of cool Maxthon innovations. With the first, when you're at a website offering a file download, you can download to the cloud instead of to your local machine, making the download available from any of your Maxthon instances. Of course, you're actually uploading the download to your private Maxthon cloud. One problem with this feature, though, was that I couldn't actually download the files to my iPhone, even if they were common types the phone could handle, such as JPGs. I could just see a list of what was uploaded.

To push the current page to your other devices running Maxthon, you click the same Plus Sign in the address bar used to Favorite the page. When I clicked Cloud Push to… a dialog showed entries for all the other machines and mobile devices I'd set up with my Maxthon Cloud Sync. Ticking the button for my iPhone caused a notification to appear on the phone that linked to the page I'd pushed. If I already had Maxthon open on the iPhone, my pushed page simply loaded. Pretty cool, but maybe more useful would be to send these to other people—which you can do with Cloud Push's Share with friends tab using email or even, wait for it: SMS text message!

Cloud Tabs, just like they sound, show what tabs are open on any of your devices and computers running Maxthon. For both desktop and mobile browsers, you have to go to the new tab page to see each device's tab set. Unlike Firefox's tab syncing, however, it doesn't actually replicate the tab set on the second machine, but it does show what tabs are open on each device, and each machine's set has an "open all" choice.