I’ve had a head start on the browser-face-off. I’ve spent pretty much one whole day, and then some, customising Firefox but, with the exception of one feature that I use a lot on Maxthon, I’ve pretty much replicated Maxthon on Firefox!

First off, I should say that I really, really would like to love and use Firefox. Not because it’s supposedly more secure (I don’t hold much faith in that claim, nor is it a criteria in my choosing browsers), nor because most of my friends are using it but because it has some fun and useful extensions, or add-ons, that I wouldn’t mind having/using but that I don’t, so far, find so absolutely essential that I would abandon Maxthon. So… I really, really want to like and love Firefox but it has to provide me with those features of Maxthon’s that I have come to find so integral to my browsing experience.

Thus, I spent most of the last 24 hours thrawling through Firefox’s add-ons directory in the search for add-ons that would replicate the features that I use so much on Maxthon. After much downloading, installing, re-starting, uninstalling and re-starting again, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of mimicking Maxthon on Firefox.

• To replicate the drag and open link, or drag and search feature on Maxthon, I’m using the “Drag de Go” extension.
• I discovered that Firefox now has keyword searches, so that matches the alias searching function that I use so much in Maxthon.
• The “Tab Mix Plus” extension upgrades Firefox’s native tab-management to what’s available out-of-the-box in Maxthon.
• The “Quicknote” extension replicates Maxthon’s “Simple Collector”, although it is slightly more limited in features, but only just slightly.

There is one more feature on Maxthon that I’ve been trying to replicate to no avail and that is the ability to map the keyboard’s function-keys to URLs in order to open these URLs with the click of just one key. There is an extension called “Bookmark Keys” but that doesn’t seem to work at the moment, and even if it did, it would have meant clicking two-keys rather than just one.

This brings me to the following comment: all these add-ons are a great feature of Firefox. It gives users great flexibility in customising their browser almost exactly as they want (provided the add-ons exist). However, because all these add-ons are developed by different people, it is not surprising that at some point, these add-ons will start to clash either with one another or with Firefox itself and either not work (in the best case scenario) or cause problems in the browser. Maxthon, on the other hand, comes with heaps of features out-of-the-box. These features are guaranteed to work and have been pretty much well integrated into the browser. However, the scant availability of plug-ins for Maxthon means that the ability to customise the browser is much more limited.

That said, there are many virtues in having features built into the browser, not least of which is this issue of security that so many laud upon Firefox. After a very long time, and I mean years here, of trouble free browsing on Maxthon, I finally re-encountered the problem of browser hijack and pesty advertisements today on surprise, surprise Firefox. It was a page/site that I have many times visited on Maxthon without a hitch. I was disappointed to discover that Firefox doesn’t come with an ad-blocker out of the box. Maxthon does. I had to install “Adblock Plus” before I was safe and secure on Firefox… or so I think… hmph!

Next: some of the “fun” things that I do like about Firefox!

Read Matt’s initial experience with Maxthon here.

Posted on July 22nd, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech