Brief Adventure with Maxthon

Here’s a little story that I find amusing. Perhaps you will as well.

Last month I got Google Chrome working on my trusty old ThinkPad (Pentium 2) running Windows 2000. I was very pleased — this turned out to be a wonderful way to keep the old laptop useful and responsive.

However, over time Chrome started getting a little “flaky” on that machine. Sometimes it would blow up as it launched and I would have to clear out the cache and settings and relaunch. Or worse, it would be fixed by a reboot. Yesterday it just flat out stopped even trying to launch. I suppose that Chrome’s auto-updating finally updated to something that would no longer work.

Bummer.

However, I had recently read that the Maxthon browser was switching rendering engines over to WebKit which is what Chrome uses as well. I glanced at their site and noticed that Windows 2000 was listed as a supported OS. Sweet!

I downloaded and installed the latest version (2.5.8.1332) and… man, was I underwhelmed! What a pooch! Seriously, I was already mentally drafting a flaming blog post after 2 minutes of use.

Fortunately, one of my last stops with Maxthon was to see how it handled Facebook. It handled it OK, but Facebook displayed a “You may want to update your browser” message, telling me that my version of Internet Explorer is old. Whoops! Maxthon used to be based on IE — clearly I wasn’t running the right version. I blushed.

Turns out that is still in alpha form (follow in the Maxthon 3 forums) and I plan to give it a shot soon. Very soon.

Possibly Related posts: