Maxthon Cloud 4.05 review: a web browser you should install and try today
Free
Manufacturer: Maxthon
Our Rating:
By Roland Waddilove | PC Advisor | 29 April 13
Maxthon Cloud is a web browser that takes the engines from Internet Explorer and Chrome and adds a new skin and features. It’s well worth trying out. Here’s our Maxthon Cloud 4.05 review–
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Maxthon Cloud is a browser that takes the engines from Internet Explorer and Chrome and adds a new skin and features. The current version of Chrome is 26, but Maxthon uses version 22. However, Chrome is updated so frequently that v22 is only around six months old.
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Maxthon 1.0 browser is fast, has roots in Chrome
Maxthon 2.1 review
Maxthon uses whichever version of Internet Explorer is installed on your PC, so it’s down to you how up to date it is. A button at the right-hand side of the address box switches from IE to Chrome engines.
A large number of extras are bundled with the browser. For example, there’s an optional dock that sits on the left side of the screen and this provides icons to launch various features. One opens a ‘downloads’ window that’s more convenient than Chrome’s download tab.
There’s a note-taking widget, which is handy when using the web for research. An RSS button opens a newsreader tab and you can subscribe to news feeds and import feeds from Google Reader.
The dock can be customized and there’s a palette of extra items like eBay, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and others. See also: Beginner’s guide to Twitter
The status bar at the bottom of browser windows is rarely used for anything beneficial, but Maxthon adds a system monitor. It can display CPU usage, upload and download speeds, memory usage and more.
This is excellent and useful information. You also get a button to access an advert blocker so you can browse the web ad-free. There’s a Safari-like reader mode that strips web pages of the clutter and just displays the content; magic fill for online forms; a night mode for browsing in the dark (we’re sure there must be a legitimate reason for doing this).
Maxthon Cloud, as the name suggests, provides a cloud service that performs several useful functions. It syncs browsing data across all your computers, tablets and smartphones (iOS and Android) like Google Chrome does. You can also send a web link from your desktop to your smartphone or tablet.
Plus, there’s more: you can push content to other computers and devices, such as links, text and images, and downloads are also stored online, which enables them to be downloaded to other computers and devices.
Maxthon Cloud 4.05: Bottom line
If you like feature-laden browsers, this will be right up your street. It has some useful cloud-based features that are not available in other web browsers. There are useful extensions too.