KisenoSky

Best Freeware 2008: Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and… Maxthon?

Wednesday, 7. January 2009, 04:36:12

PCMedia, as always, announced the best freeware and hardware by the end of the year Opera and Mozilla Firefox seem to make a great competition. They are two of the bests!

It’s said that Mozilla Firefox has an effective pop-up blocker. Besides, this browser only needs 55 MB of our RAM to open 25 windows at once. Hmm… But in fact, my PC gets hang and the “Network Timeout” page appears if I open more than 15 windows. Well, maybe the problem is my PC or the internet connection, not the software.

The comment for Opera is not so good. Although the popularity is comparable to Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, from the data in some sites, Mozilla Firefox has more users that Opera. I can see it… actually I myself use Opera to access my blog only. I prefer Mozilla Firefox for any download activity because if the download process is suddenly paused or stopped, it can be resumed without re-downloading the downloaded part of the file. While in Opera, it should be started from zero. But for the speed, Opera wins!

From the benchmark by PCMedia, Opera 9.6 shows a much better performance than the previous version, though. Don’t give up, Opera! Keep going forward! GANBATTE!

One thing that makes me so surprised is Maxthon 2.1.4.433, which also takes a place in Best Freeware 2008 as one of the best web browsers. The engine is based of IE’s. Wow, Internet Explorer works so slowly, eh? And I even never hear the name Maxthon before! Oops… According to PCMedia, this browser has a customable interface and tabbed browsing. It has other features like mouse gesture, privacy protection, AD Hunter, RSS hunter, etc. It doesn’t sounds so special. I’m not sure this browser can work well. But I think I should try it myself before judging.

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Comments

Alexei # 8. January 2009, 15:41

Hey there! Thanks for the blog post. By the way, if you like blogging but constantly have to switch from Firefox to Opera just to make new blog posts, may I recommend you to try the browser called Flock (www.flock.com). It is based on Firefox 3, but integrates web 2.0 social websites like twitter, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc. You can even customize it to integrate with My Opera (http://my.opera.com/devblog/blog/moveable-type-api?cid=5077963#comment5077963). Most of Firefox extensions work for it as well. It generally gets very favorable reviews (http://www.macworld.com/article/137269/2008/12/eddyawards_flock2.html). And if you like the download features of Firefox, Flock has them, too (after all, it is based on Firefox code). If you want to try something even more powerful, install DownThemAll! addon in Flock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201).

Let me know what you think about Flock

KisenoSky # 10. January 2009, 03:48

Oh wow! It sounds great! I'll tried it!

Whoa! You also promote it in Twitter!

Alexei # 10. January 2009, 23:41

Well, I don't promote it, but I encourage users to try alternatives

Anonymous # 21. June 2009, 18:08

Joshua Issac writes:

"It has other features like mouse gesture, privacy protection, AD Hunter, RSS hunter, etc. It doesn’t sounds so special. I’m not sure this browser can work well."

You should definitely try this browser before judging it based on the rendering engine it uses. And the popularity of Opera ( 60%) or Firefox (>20%).

Alexei # 22. June 2009, 16:58

Yeah, I agree, Maxthon is a surprisingly good browser. I have tried it and liked it. However, some sites/bookmarklets don't seem to work well (I guess that's the case with Opera, as well).