There used to be a fad for putting “Easter eggs” in software. These were hidden, undocumented bits of code that revealed a surprise if you stumbled upon the right combination of keystrokes and mouse clicks–sort of like the bejeweled scenes that lay inside Tiffany Easter eggs, which explains the origin of the term.
Software Easter eggs, however, are not as valuable or delightful as Tiffany surprises. Usually they are something as unamusing as a list of the names of everyone who worked on the software or a little animated scene.
Maxthon has its own sort of Easter eggs–not that I can tell that was what the developers of Max had in mind when they created them. I suspect, given the wealthy of features in Maxthon, they thought they were just running out of traditional places to stow commands, tools, and menus that Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome should only wish they had, hidden or otherwise. Whatever, the result is that some of Maxthon’s most helpful features are hidden unless you have a roadmap to them.
That’s what this is–a roadmap, or, rather, the first of several road maps that will appear over the coming days. I’m sacrificing the convenience of having all the tourist attractions on a single map because in a single map the territory gets too crowded and the details are too small.
To start off, we’ll look at two menus that aren’t in the menu bar.
To find the menus, look at the right end of the address bar–the field where you enter the URL of a site you want to surf to. You’ll see a triangle–green in Maxthon’s native garb–that is the Go Button. Just to the right of the Go Button is a small, very small triangle–the one I’ve circled in red.
Click it and a two-item menu drops down. One menu choice sis for Translations. The other is for Useful Tools. Click on the Translation option, and the menu shown in the road map appears, offering to translate the current page or anything else you enter into the Babel Fish form that appears.
Useful Tools leads to a menu with many of the same tools users get excited about when they use Firefox’s Smart Toolbar (and some Firefox is missing). The menu provides the current page’s Alexa ranking and domain information, lets you launch a archived version of the page, find similar pages, or list all the links to other pages.
Coming Next: The “Additional” Features
Maxthon
Don’t surf the Web. Seize it!
Unless I’m familiar with the icons that each tab displays, it pretty much comes down to poking around on tabs until I hit on the one I need.But it doesn’t have to be that tedious. Maxthon has several features built-in and in plug-ins that make dealing with hidden tabs a lot easier. Here are my favorites:
