Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20151224121621/@comment-3547390-20160220145249

Yeah, Maxthon is not very well known. The near lack of promotion is one of the big reasons it probably is not heavily used.

I have heard about Netscape, but never used it or Opera. Growing up, I just used Internet Explorer, I don't think we even bothered or realized we had other options at the time. I think eventually we reached a point where Internet Explorer was being ridiculed for being slow and our computer was dragging to a crawl, so we thought to try to find a browser that would allow us to get around faster. My family has basically become accustomed to whatever I was using since we had the family computer at the time (at the time I was starting to tinker with the computer and change things on it just to see what could be done). Opera and Safari are two browsers I remember trying when we started branching out, I forget why we even decided to do such. Both just didn't have anything appealing. I don't think I could tell you what the big benefits of either browser are off the top of my head.

I know the first browser we started using after Internet Explorer was Firefox. I embraced extensions quickly, seeing what features a bunch could do and just loving the idea of being able to expand the browser's functionality. It worked for a short time, but the UI was clunky at the time (I forget what version it was, recent downloads of Firefox show a UI much more similar to Chrome and a browser that works much better than the one I remember). I remember Firefox freezing at various points, possibly due to the massive amount of useless extensions, but in general it just didn't flow nicely.

Google Chrome was my browser of choice near the end of using my family computer and the start of me having a private laptop (lesson to kids out there, you might get your own computer if you mess up your parents computer with your experiments. I remember adding a Stardock 3d desktop and adding a radio player that would randomly play songs, plus changing every sound on the computer to random shouts, renaming and changing icons so that they looked like different programs, and trying to make as many Windows 7 features I could get for Windows XP). I think the lesson here is not to go crazy with features with an extremely old computer with minimal RAM and hard drive space. Anyway, I loved Google Chrome for years due to the fast speeds in comparison to every other browser out there and the minimalist GUI (always a fan of minimalism and simplicity).

The main reason I even bothered to check out Maxthon was because it said that its speeds were 2x those of Chrome. At the time I switched, that was quite true, and faster speeds are one of the best features to have for a browser. Since then I have found the dual engines quite valuable, finding incompatible pages in one that could have been a pain since I have uninstalled IE on this computer. There are quite a few other features such as a multi-search, a reader mode, and a translator; none of these do I find as useful. A nice feature allows for a split-screen, but with Aero snap it is quite easy to work around, plus the delay to switch modes takes about as much time as loading a new browser window and snapping it to place. I also have become accustomed to working without it for a short time since version 4.9 removed it temporarily during this beta cycle. I have since reverted to 4.4.8 until a version comes out that allows for a functional Youtube experience.