Hello!
By not keeping Maxthon up-to-date, they just make more work for themselves...
There's a new stable Chromium release every 4 weeks (& security refreshes every 2 weeks), which includes API changes, internal refactors, security fixes, rendering engine updates, V8 JavaScript engine changes & build system changes.
If a browser skips multiple milestones, they’re skipping tens of thousands of commits, hundreds of API changes, dozens of subsystem rewrites, making merging much more of an effort.
Merge conflicts grow non‑linearly: when a browser maintains custom patches (UI, adblocker, sync, sidebar, etc.), each Chromium update requires reapplying those patches...
If you update every 4 weeks, it means small conflicts, predictable work
Every 6-12 months, means massive conflicts, broken features, patches that no longer apply, & sometimes entire subsystems rewritten upstream.
Maxthon doesn't even bother with yearly upgrades!
Browsers like Opera, Vivaldi, Brave & Edge update within days of Chromium so it keeps the rebase small.
Being so far behind also means security fixes become harder to backport (Chromium ships dozens of security fixes per milestone)...
This means they must backport fixes manually (we all know they don't bother with that at all!).
Some security fixes depend on newer architecture & cannot be backported cleanly, so the patch gap grows, increasing user risk!
Google explicitly warns that backporting complex fixes is often not viable & recommends staying on the stable branch for security reasons.
The longer they wait, the more upstream assumptions break...
Chromium regularly removes: deprecated APIs, old rendering paths, legacy flags & obsolete build configurations.
When a browser is far behind, its custom code may rely on APIs that no longer exist, so updating then requires: rewriting integrations, replacing removed APIs, rebuilding UI hooks, reworking extension systems & fixing broken features.
By not updating close to Chromium’s release cycle, Maxthon guarantees: larger merges, more conflicts, more broken features, more time spent fixing upstream changes, more difficulty applying security patches & more regressions for users.
Browsers that update quickly (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave & Edge) do so because it reduces engineering cost, not increase it!
