The Truth about Maxthon
I may be able to straighten out some of the confusion in other comments:
OBJECTIVITY Some commenters doubt the objectivity of the author. As far as I know, he has no connection with Maxthon International. And he's not the only person praising Maxthon's speed. A year ago, Lee Mathews of downloadsquad.com--working with a beta of Maxthon--found it to be faster than Chrome. (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/09/01/maxthon-3-gets-turbo-charged-with-webkit/) More recently Technology Blog in comprehensive testing also found Maxthon to be the fastest browser. (http://arvindgaba.com/computer/browser-2/maxthon-3-beta-speed-test-vs-firefox-chrome-iemaxthon3-being-fastest-of-all/) Now that Maxthon is up to ramming speed, its developers are busily transporting its popular features in Maxthon 2 to Max 3.
Frankenstein Timop asks, "Isn't Maxthon a Frankenstein-mix of Gecko+Trident?" Maxthon 3 has two display rendering engines, Trident, which is also used by I.E. and several other browsers, and WebKit, which is also used by Chrome and Safari. Max 3 switches automatically between the two browsers to use the one that will better display the page it's loading.It's like a hybrid car.
Hackers the hackers from China first of all may not be coming from China. Any decent hacker would disguise his IP address. Regardless, Maxthon does no hacking and shares no information with the Chinese government. It is politically neutral.
Reviews And ijacks asks, "If Maxthon 3 is so good why don't we see rave reviews of it?" Fair question. The answer is that Maxthon has only recently started pushing into the U.S. Market. And because of the way some research companies figure the user shares of browsers, for years Maxthon was counted as Internet Explorer. That has changed at Net Applications and StatCounter, and now you can see there is no difference between Maxthon's and Safari's Windows market share, and Maxthon is only about a percent point or so behind Opera.
As ares1214 says, if you don't like his benchmark numbers, run your own tests.
Ron White
Advocate
Maxthon International