What's responsible for the big change? Well, prior versions of Maxthon had used the Trident engine from Internet Explorer. While that meant Maxthon was good at handling IE-friendly pages that didn't work so well on other browsers, it came at the price of last-generation performance.

With WebKit now under the hood, Maxthon 3 looks likes it's ready to make some serious noise. Enthusiasts, get ready - this is going to be a fun year when it comes to browsers.

Many of the core features you'd want in an everyday browser aren't working yet in Maxthon, but if you want to take it for a spin anyway you can download it from Maxthon's forums or from Softpedia.

Firefox and Internet Explorer get most of the attention, but they're not the only web browsers out there. There's also Safari, Opera, and Konqueror. But if you want to try a web browser that is guaranteed to work with every page designed for Internet Explorer without actually you know, using Internet Explorer, you might want to check out Maxthon.

Maxthon is based on Internet Explorer, so it uses the same rendering engine. But it has dozens of features you won't find in Microsoft's web browser. Maxthon 2 has just been released after a long beta period, and it includes a whole slew of updates.

Here are just a few of Maxthon's cooler features

• Completely skinnable interface
• Integrated Ad-blocker, popup blocker and content filter
  
• Support for mouse gestures (navigate forward, backward, or between tabs by right clicking and moving your mouse in various patterns)
• Drag a link to open it in a new tab
• Built in feed reader

[via CyberNet]

Seeing a bunch of lean code jockeys building the next generation of web browsers is a reality TV show I'd watch. Since that's probably not happening any time soon, I'll take the next best thing: Read/WriteWeb's Web Browser Faceoff, by Alex Iskold. Iskold reviews six of the latest crop of web bowsers: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera 9, Flock, and Maxthon. I highly recommend reading his entire round-up, but in case your attention span ain't what it used to be, here's what he concludes about our trusty browsers:

• IE7: "Solid release, which is going to help Microsoft maintain the market leadership in the near future"
• Firefox: "We think that Firefox is going to continue narrowing IE's lead, but await with interest the next major version!"
• Safari: "It's a clean and simple web 1.0 browser, but needs a major feature boost in order to be a contender even on the Mac."
• Opera: "We can see why fans like this browser, but a bigger future depends on spicing it up and poring in the marketing dollars."
• Flock: "Great productivity browser for web 2.0"
• Maxthon: "Need to apply Occam's Razor (i.e. make it simpler), but definitely could be a contender because of solid service integration."

"Even though IE and Firefox are far ahead today," Iskold concludes, "we see that other browser like Flock and Maxthon are ramping up support for the latest web 2.0 services - making themselves stand out and attracting early adopters. ... Faceoff bottom line: This round of browser competition is going to be at least as interesting as the Netscape vs. IE ten years ago. And hopefully less one-sided!" Hear, hear!

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.

In today's day and age of multiple viable browsers, it can be a minor annoyance to have to copy and paste URLs from one browser window to another to move a page from, say, Opera to Firefox. Or IE to Netcaptor. Or Maxthon to Firefox. You get the picture.

For many, simply having the option of rendering a page with the IE engine as an alternative to Firefox is all you need; in that case give the IE Tab Firefox extension a whirl. It can render a page using IE right in a tab in Firefox. Very cool.

But for those with more challenging multiple browser scenarios, Optool is the solution. With the tap of a hot-key, or an ingenious long right-click, a page can be moved from one browser to another with no fuss, no muss. Out of the box, Optool supports and can automatically detect Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer (multiple installations), Netcaptor, and Netscape. And if that's not quite enough for you (hey, where's Maxthon?!) you can manually configure additional browsers.

Optool is not quite free, although it's close. If you find you use it regularly, the author of Optool requests that you send him a postcard from your location. Hey, that's not too much to ask, right?

[via Chris Pirillo]

InternetWeek has an interesting round-up review of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera, and Maxthon. Four editors go to bat for each of the Windows browsers, and included is a nice "Visual Tour" of each plus side-by-side comparisons of some key features. There's no "this one is best" conclusion but it's a nice way to get an idea of what each browser does best.