Cloud Browser with Muscle & Security, Startup Maxthon Caters to HTML5 Users
So while no one is certainly abandoning their reliance on Chrome, Safari or Firefox, Maxthon offers the power user some muscle behind cloud computing. Currently the search engine for cloud computing has 100 million unique visitors each month and is being used in 140 different countries.
The Vice President for Maxthon, Karl Mattson relates the browsers growth to web developing and gaming communities who are satisfied with the memory management being built-in, HTML5 support and GPU acceleration. He states that they specifically are catering to the gaming crowd and its need for heavy use of HTML5 in building games and a browser that can run them.
Maxthon is based in Beijing and has other offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Founded by Jeff Chen in 2006 when Chen was at the National University of Singapore. He had relieved the coding job from the MyIE founder and was able to buildup a community of over six million users. It was with their feedback from that experience that he formulated Maxthon. The latest version is a Chromium base that is Chrome compatible.
Mattson stated that Maxthon will continue to focus on three specific areas: portability, out of the box user experience and performance.
Certainly it’s a benefit that Maxthon works with all platforms and it is therefore convenient for those who use both Macs and Windows, or any other kind of mobile OS, allowing them to maintain their data synced across all devices by using a Maxthon Passport account.
Maxthon has decided to leverage international boundaries by localizing in each market it enters. For instance, when it entered the Russian market it partnered with Yandex, the largest search engine in that market and produced a version of the browser in Russian. In the China marketplace they published a Maxthon version for Mac machines that comes pre-loaded with Aliay, that country’s biggest third party payment provider.
Maxthon offers its user a lot of built in capabilities that negate the need for extension and plug-ins, but it still allows for the user to customize their options in the browser. Another plus for users is the focus Maxthon’s placed on privacy and security, particularly after the NSA surveillance scandal, and the browse utilizes a AES 256 encryption.
Mattson declared that even under the guise of a subpoena from the government, Maxthon would be unable to provide much information as there isn’t a record to be found. He used the words, “technologically impossible” for them to be able to deliver. In fact he described their security and encryption being such that if they were to hand over a disk it would relate only “mush.”
Maxthon’s been backed financially by the VC firms Charles River Ventures, WI Harper and Morten Lund, the early Skype investor. Maxthon’s revenue stream is generated by its premium service sales.