I’m excited. I’m so very excited.

My best mate and I have challenged each other to an internet browser face-off. This is gong to be visionary, path-breaking stuff. And we’re going to blog about it. It’ll be like our own reality show!!

For a very long while now, I’d say more than a few years, I’ve been using Maxthon instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I’ve learned to love and appreciate the many features that it has, but more importantly I’ve become so accustomed and comfortable with it that it’s proving an obstacle just trying another browser, let alone migrating entirely. Matt has indirectly tried endlessly to help me test Firefox to no avail. I keep finding shortcomings with Firefox and give up within an hour or two. After many trials, I’ve concluded that the one feature that Firefox does not yet have but which Maxthon does and which I have found to be integral to my internet browsing experience is this: the ability to highlight a URL (that is not hyperlinked, i.e. just plain text) on a page and then to use ONE mouse gesture to open that highlighted URL in a new tab. Similarly, with Maxthon, I can highlight a word or a series of words on a page and then to use ONE mouse gesture to search those words (using my default search engine, in this case Google) in a new tab. This is a feature I use constantly and rely upon quite heavily. It saves me a lot of typing, mouse clicks and time and it’s something that I’ve been very reluctant to give up. While some Firefox plugins that I’ve tried can perform similar functions, they’ve usually involved extra clicks of the mouse - this is just not good enough for me.

There is another feature on Maxthon that I’ve also come to rely upon quite a bit, though it’s not so much a deal-breaker: on Maxthon, you can customise the internet search function such that you can use an “alias” or code to use different search engines quite quickly with minimal typing. For instance, if I type “am TEST” in the URL bar, Maxthon will automatically return a page from Amazon US with the search results for “TEST”, “am” being the code I had set for Amazon US. If I type “mw TEST” in the URL bar, Maxthon will automatically return a page from Merriam Webster’s online dictionary with the search results for “TEST”, “mw” being the code I had set for Merriam Webster. This is pretty nifty and extremely useful especially if you do a lot of internet searches and you can customise it to search almost any search engine that exists out there.

Anyway, Matt and I decided, or rather stumbled on the idea of an internet browser face-off. Matt has been a long time user of Firefox and I’ve not previously been able to persuade him to try Maxthon. So from Monday, 23 July 2007, we will each swap browsers for a week and blog about our experience. I will use nothing but Firefox for a week and Matt Maxthon. We will both find our internet browsing experience confusing and frustrating and we will bitch about it constantly but hopefully at the end of the week, we might have a more informed decision of which browser we each individually definitely prefer. But we’re both definitely adamant that Internet Explorer sucks!

Posted on July 21st, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech