Maxthon Web Browser

The Ultimate Out-of-box Experience

Easy to use and powerful straight out of the box
Created by people thinking out of the box to come up with new ways to use the Internet

Free for all! Over 300 million downloads worldwide!

Maxthon Works the Way You Want It To

Swap, add, move, remove, and change Maxthon's tool bars, icons, menus, colors, skins, and layouts until it looks the way you would have designed it.
Don't like menus? Use hot keys. Don't like hot keys? Use word aliases. Don't like aliases? Use toolbars. Don't like toolbars? Then use mouse gestures. It's all up to you.
Think we left something out? Pick from more than 1,400 plug-ins that make Maxthon the do-all of browsers.

Other companies sell remote conferencing, screen capture, electronic passports, and automatic password managers as separate programs. With Max, they're free – just like Maxthon itself.

Maxthon's so secure you can throw away that blanket.

Maxthon is 100% free of viruses, spyware, adware – any kind of malware.
The built-in Ad Hunter blocks harmful, or just irritating ads, images and pages.
Filter packs screen out offensive and irritating Web pages, and you decide what's offensive and irritating.
More, more, more....

There's so much more that we can't squeeze it all into one or two screens, but you can find out all the details here.

www.maxthon.com

Microsoft modernizes Web ambitions with IE9

For those who doubted that Microsoft was serious in its effort to re-engage with the Web, it's time to put the skepticism aside.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that's designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

The new software is only a framework, raw enough that it's still missing a "back" button. But with "a few" updated preview versions set to arrive at eight-week intervals, the project will develop into a beta, a release candidate, and eventually the full-fledged product IE9, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer and the executive who'll describe the project at Mix.

Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware; and a new effort at gathering and responding to feedback from those using the prototype software, Hachamovitch said.


Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager

IE9 is months from release, but already it holds the potential to alter the browser market. Not only could it reinvigorate competition with a host of new rivals, it could help usher in the cloud computing era that some of those rivals are eager to embrace. In that era, the Web transforms from a foundation for static documents and Web sites into a foundation for interactive programs.

IE6, released in 2001 when Microsoft had won the browser wars of the 1990s, still is widely used today. It's loathed among Web developers who want to use more modern Web technologies, and despite the release of IE8 a year ago, Microsoft is still saddled with a reputation as a company behind the browser curve. Mozilla's Firefox now accounts for nearly a quarter of usage, Google's Chrome has burst onto the scene and now is in third place, while Internet Explorer continues to gradually lose its share of usage.

With IE9, though, Microsoft is trying to rebuild the browser for the Web that's to come through new standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, updates to Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages and Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.

The software caught the attention of Microsoft's biggest browser rival. "IE9 looks great, very glad to see it. Congrats to the IE team!" said Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Firefox backer Mozilla, in a tweet.

www.download.cnet.com

Firefox 3.0 reaching end of the line

A few months later than expected, Mozilla is calling it quits for version 3.0 of its Firefox browser.

"There will be no more updates for Firefox 3.0.x," Mozilla said Tuesday in a meeting planning document. The last update will be Firefox 3.0.19, due March 30, according to the Mozilla Wiki page. Mozilla started building the new version after some last-minute security fixes over the weekend.

Mozilla had planned to discontinue support for Firefox 3.0 in January, but the browser got a lifespan extension after Firefox 3.6 arrived later than planned.

The move reflects a gradual shift toward upgrading browsers more frequently, not just to keep up with new features, but also to free up resources otherwise spent on testing and maintaining older browsers and to reduce security risks associated with them. Google is even more aggressive: its Chrome browser updates automatically in the background by default, and it calls new releases "milestones" to be passed rather than version numbers to be attained.

Microsoft issues frequent patches to its browsers but sees things differently when it comes to longer-term issues. It still maintains support for Internet Explorer 6, introduced in 2001. "We are excited for people to move on. We want people to move on," IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said in an interview this week for the IE9 Platform Preview launch, but meanwhile, providing security updates is the "responsible" thing to do.

Browsers are a fast-moving, increasingly important, technology and are central to the shift toward cloud computing. But there's a tension between organizations and people, for whom change can be a technical challenge or an expensive compatibility-breaking problem. Compatibility with standards can ease these transitions, but Web standards are in flux and aren't uniformly supported either with browsers or Web sites.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 with great fanfare in June 2008, and it's been patched as 3.0.18. Firefox 3.6 is the current supported version, and, of course, future work is under way. Mozilla has released two public alphas of its successor, which is called 3.7 for now though that's not necessarily the final name.

In the nearer term, Mozilla also preparing a Firefox 3.6 update called Lorentz. Mozilla had hoped for a beta release of Lorentz. But its chief feature--the out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP) design aimed to reduce crashes by putting Flash Player and its like into a separate memory compartment--is proving thorny. In addition,
Mozilla programmers have only just begun the OOPP work for Mac OS X.

http://www.download.cnet.com