Download Squad

The official Maxthon blog has a post that announces the release (finally) of the 2.0 public preview version of their IE-based browser. The link they point to (which is the one I'm linking directly to here) is sort of confusing, since there's nothing about the 2.0 preview version on the page you land at. You first have to create a Maxthon account, at which time they present the link to the preview version. Some clarifying information would have been helpful.

Strangely, once you download and install this version, a disclaimer comes up immediately with the following information:

Maxthon2 disclaimer:
Welcome to Maxthon 2.0 Community Preview version. By using this version,

You understand that:

1. This is not even an alpha version. It's only for you to know what we are doing.
2. The features in this version are not complete.
3. It may crash often :-)

You agreed that:

1. You will not disclose this version to other people or media, otherwise, your account will be deleted.
2.You will provide feedback.
3.You will not complain :-).

Now, press F1 to start your adventure.

Based on this, I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be pointing you to this release. But given that they posted it in their publicly-accessible official blog, I see no reason not to link to it. When I first read the disclaimer above, I thought it was telling me that I'm not allowed to talk about this release at all publicly. But after considering how ludicrous that demand would be, I came to the conclusion that by the statement "You will not disclose this version to other people or media, otherwise, your account will be deleted.", they must mean that they don't want anyone passing around the installer executable to people that haven't actually created Maxthon accounts.

If I'm wrong, I can't say that I'll be all that disappointed to have my account deleted - who wants to support an organization that would be that ridiculous and out of touch with the way the web and media works these days? And is account removal really any sort of significant threat? They can't possibly think that they're going to release software publicly, then bully everyone into not talking about it. But I hope I'm right and it's actually fine to be discussing the release, because Maxthon has long been the browser that made using IE tolerable for me. Yes, I've used IE 7 extensively - at least enough to know that it's not a reasonable browser answer for me.

In any event, it's mildly disappointing to see that after all this time and build-up to Maxthon 2.0, all we have so far is a sort-of public preview release (they call it pre-alpha) that obviously needs a lot of work before it's ready for prime time. It certainly seems snappy, but in my brief look at it, it appears to be missing some significant features from version 1. I'm also not sure that I'm a fan of the funky space-saving technique of putting the menu up centered in title bar, since that breaks a very significant Windows UI standard. But we are looking at a work-in-progress, so let's just hope the work keeps progressing. Maxthon is too important of a browser to not get it right.