Maxthon 2.0.9 has been released and can be downloaded from our main site. In this version the popup blocker has been improved, and popup blacklist has also been re-introduced. Popup blacklist is an old but reliable popup blocking technique which had been mostly replaced by intelligent popup blockers. Intelligent popup blockers allow requested popups but block unrequested popups with reference to user activity. But since IE6 SP2’s integration of an intelligent popup blocker, more and more websites are playing tricks to bypass intelligent popup blocking, by opening popups when a link or a button is clicked, making the popups “requested”. Under such circumstances the good old popup blacklist is the one to rely on.

The Find In Page dialog has been redesigned to provide more functions and improve user friendliness. “Download All” function has been added to Maxthon Downloader and a status bar button is also added for monitoring download status and managing downloads more conveniently. COM plugin support is further refined and starts yielding. There are already several new COM plugins released in the addons site for use in 2.0.9.

There are many more improvements and fixes in 2.0.9, like more complete unicode support, drag and drop multiple selected links etc. You may check the changelog for a complete list of the more significant changes.

When Maxthon 1.x was in its early stage of development a few years back, the most debated feature request had to be the inclusion of a download manager. File download is undoubtedly an integral part of Internet browsing and that’s why every browser has a download manager, or sort of. It just happens that browser integrated download managers are usually weak in features, and it doesn’t help that the one with IE is probably the weakest.

A dedicated external download manager is the obvious choice for experienced users. But for casual users, they don’t want to install extra programs, they don’t want to run a standby download manager in the background, or wait “eternally” for the download manager to startup when they want to download, and they don’t want to go through dozens of options just to make sure the download manager works with the browser. They just want something simple but capable of doing the job – to download without worrying interruptions, to check the download status handily, and oh yes, to download faster.

But back then Maxthon users were mostly experienced, and could already had one or more download managers in their computer. And then, would someone resonably expect the Maxthon team to be able to make an integrated download manager anywhere near the quality of dozens of download managers freely available, and at the same time keeping pace of Maxthon’s own development? Not to mention that an integrated download manager would “certainly” has impact on Maxthon’s resource usage and performance.

So however reasonable the request had been, a Maxthon integrated download manager is a no go… until now, when Maxthon 2.0 is entering its prime.  (To be continued)