My friend Imman got irritated with many of his friends praising the arrival of Firefox 3 so he decided to try the darned thing to see for himself what the hype is all about. He is already using Maxthon, a powerful tabbed-browsing shell to the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Read his assessment where he disses Firefox 3 out-of-the-box. He understands that Firefox can be extended in functionality but he prefers a powerful default browser (e.g., Maxthon has mouse gestures by default). And just like Firefox, Maxthon has a mature add-on community to further make Maxthon more powerful.

Well, I decided to do a playful jest in return and to try Maxthon 2, but not the Maxthon Classic he is using, so as to up the ante. And to further raise the bar, I’m gonna look at the default Firefox 2 features (not Firefox 3) that I’ve come to rely on and see if Maxthon has these by default. (Note I’m using IE6.)

• Find in page. To quickly look for something on a page in Firefox, I simply press the slash key (/) then type away my search words. (This behavior was adapted for Firefox from the Unix program vi.) And when I want to search for the next occurrence, I just press F3, and then Shift-F3 to search backwards. In Maxthon, to bring up the search in page feature, you either type in the search bar then select the find in page feature (or click the highlight button to highlight all the occurrences, which is pretty cool) or press Ctrl-F, then type away. But, there’s no keyboard shortcut to find the next/previous occurrence!

• Session recovery. Firefox has crashed a few times on me, sometimes in the middle of typing a blog post, but fortunately, when I reopen the Firefox, all of my previous tabs including the text that I have typed in web pages reappear magically. This has saved me a lot of times! (This worked even when the computer went out because of a power interruption.) I simulated the same in Maxthon (by aborting the Maxthon.exe process in Windows Task Manager) and didn’t get the same behavior. Sure, Maxthon was able to remember what tabs were opened last but all of the text I typed were gone!

• Spell-checking. What? Maxthon doesn’t do inline spell-checking? That’s so 2005!

• View source. I use this feature quite a lot to copy HTML code between pages. But Maxthon, being an IE shell, uses the default view source behavior of opening Notepad. Boo! Firefox, on the other hand, shows beautiful syntax-highlighted source code. I also would like to note that Maxthon does have the view selection source feature (wherein you select part of a web page and only get the HTML source for that part) but it does a stupid job of mangling the context HTML.

• Feed subscription. Maxthon has a built-in feed reader, but I prefer using Google Reader (and Bloglines before). Firefox is able to detect feeds in web pages using auto-discovery and I use this to do two-click subscriptions to blogs to any web feed reader I want (and this can be a one-click operation if you prefer). Maxthon has no such functionality for external or web-based feed readers and it forces you to use the built-in one. Bad move.

• DOM Inspector and Javascript Console. Where are these in Maxthon? Oh right, IE. Pfft. Even if I don’t install any web developer plug-ins for Firefox 2 such as Firebug, I still have these really powerful web developer features by default (well, an option during installation) in Firefox 2.

I could go on and on, but these points should suffice for now.

Did I mention that Maxthon uses the IE rendering engine? Who would want to use that when Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Apple Safari), and Opera render pages so much better (IE7 notwithstanding)? In addition, Firefox is cross-platform so I can expect the same default experience even if I’m browsing on a friend’s ASUS Eee PC or MacBook, or if I’m using my Linux workstation at the office.

So no thanks, Maxthon. My hard drive says it was nice knowing you, but you have to go. All that this experiment has achieved is to instill in me a greater appreciation of Firefox. I’ve been using it for years and, while I can say bad things about it, I’ve seen that Firefox still blows the competition out of the water.

P.S. I am not trying to convince Imman to switch. I know for a fact that getting accustomed to a piece of software takes time and it’ll be really hard to adjust to something new. Imman is quite contented with Maxthon and I recognize that. This post is simply a way to show that the dissing can go the other way too. Hehehe.