The Maxthon Guy is not totally impressed by speed tests.  After all, the slowest part of any computer system is the user fumbling around with keyboard and mouse. And with browsers, the speed of your internet connection has more influence on the speediness of your surfing than the speed with which the browser displays the incoming Web page. That’s why at this blog we don’t resort to benchmarking and….

(What? Really?  Well, I’ll be…..)

So, as I was just saying, we rely heavily on benchmarking to tell us how Maxthon and the upcoming Max-3 compare to the competition.  And we particularly like to use objective testing done by others so no one can accuse us of fiddling with the numbers.

For example, Lee Mathews at the Download Squad put the latest build of Max-3 up against the generally acknowledged speed demon on the Internet, Google’s Chrome. Using the V8 Benchmark Suite, Mathews came away with the scores shown in the screen shot above. But it’s a bit hard to read, so here are the same scores. (Higher numbers in boldface are faster):

Maxthon Max-3        Google Chrome

Richards                                 3,328                      3,286

DeltaBlue                                2,962                      3,388

Crypto                                   2,823                      2,725

RayTrace                                4,576                      4,160

EarleyBoyer                             5,197                      4,361

RegExp                                    976                         946

Splay                                    4,692                      5,594

Overall                                  3,143                      3,127

Max-3 won five of the eight tests, running an alpha version of the browser that will be released early next year. We haven’t even done the fine tuning yet.

Mathews adds, “Maxthon 3 puts up pretty competitive numbers. In practical surfing on my core web apps and sites? It’s just as fast as Chrome, if not just a hair faster.”

Mathews reasons correctly that the big improvement in Maxthon’s speed came with the addition of the WebKit rendering engine riding in tandem with the engine Max has used for years, Trident.  Although Trident is slower than WebKit, we’re keeping it in Max-3 because it’s required for hundreds of thousands of Web Pages to display correctly. This hybrid engine is controlled by an automatic switching mechanism that senses what kind of page the browser is retrieving and switches between Retro Mode (Trident) and Ultra Mode (Webkit) as needed.

The result is… But I’ll let Mathews describe it:

“With WebKit now under the hood, Maxthon 3 looks like it’s ready to make some serious noise. Enthusiasts, get ready–this is going to be a fun year when it comes to browsers.”

M A X T H O N
Don’t Surf the Web. Seize it!

Categories: Benchmarks, Development, Speed | Author: MaxthonGuy @ 2009-09-22 02:10:46