Maxthon Dock in MX5? And page search!


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It is just probable I have just made a catastrophic mistake by upgrading to MX5.

I use a number of web browsers for various reasons. The main one being, I run a charity and have to keep much of that separated to ensure confidentiality and so different browsers remember different passwords. Having the MX Dock available to the different browsers was a godsend.

Is it possible to pin the sidebar ("MX dock") to the desktop as I did with MX4?

I love(d) Maxthon for many of its features: the ability to work on two webpages side by side, the easy searching for content on the page - which seems to be missing now? When checking latest research and adding links to the charity website, it has been helpful to not only have the research page open at the same time as the charity webpage but also to be able to search it for relevant information.

When lured into upgrading, the website said all my favourites and settings would be preserved but they're not. I'm having to re-teach it the IDs and passwords for all the sites I use. Sky note has been lost, supposedly replaced by Maxnotes. One category of my Sky Notes of importnat links etc for my charity had 16 topics. It now only has 11 ! Five of the most important pages of links and notes are missing! And I want to be able to access the notes from the different browsers I use. Is it possible to get those back?

And I hate the changes to the new page button. It's not so easy to browse the 80 sites I keep an eye on. I knew where I was with the old system and could scroll from one page of thumbnails to the next easily instead of having to go back to the index page each time. And It's not been easy trying to get them ordered in the right way for me to find them easily.

If it is not possible to detach the side bar nor regain my SkyNotes for use on other browsers, is it possible to revert back to MX4? (And if I do, will I be able to regain what I've lost?)

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you cannot dock the sidebar - as to going back you should be able to do that by simply re-installing MX4 - they use a different directory to store all the data and assuming you just installed 5 without fully uninstalling 4 then all your data should still be on your harddrive

if you did fully uninstall 4 then i am not sure what happens if you do a clean install - it may pull your old info down from the server but it may not

failing that a backup of the C drive and just get back the stuff you need for 4 - thats the main dir in program files and the data in user/../../appdata/roaming/maxthon3

Tony     -  Vivaldi 4 on Windows 10 64Bit
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Thanks. I'd thought the newer browser should have been better than the old one.

I'll just hope reinstalling MX 4 works. Devastated if I've lost all the important Sky Notes I'd been assembling ahead of revision for second edition of the book I'd written.

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2 hours ago, robichris said:

Thanks. I'd thought the newer browser should have been better than the old one.

I'll just hope reinstalling MX 4 works. Devastated if I've lost all the important Sky Notes I'd been assembling ahead of revision for second edition of the book I'd written.

It is better than the old one. How did you install MX5? You shouldn't have had to reinstall MX4 unless you mistakenly installed MX5 over MX4 in the same folder. MX5 should be installed in it's own new folder, and then it creates it's own data file in the app data>roaming folder. All of your settings and skynotes should all be accessible with a sync after installation. You can still continue to use MX4 but it is not being updated any more and all emphasis is being directed toward MX5. Now that you have MX4 reinstalled and all of your data and skynotes and whatever else back, try installing MX5 in a new folder named Maxthon 5, run a sync after you finish installing it and let MX5 create it's own new app data>roaming folder named Maxthon5 (the data file used by MX4 is named Maxthon3). If you find that some of your items are still not coming over, then make sure that you are syncing everything in MX4.

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I do now have both MX4 and MX5 on my machine. I cannot see any reason why MX5 is better than MX4 when it doesn't have the elements that are essential for me, namely: MX dock and "Find in page".

I have all these other browsers available to me, apart from MX, mainly to check how the websites I manage show in each: Edge, IE, Polarity, Vivaldi, Firefox and Chrome. My default and preference is MX for the reasons already stated: ability to work on 2 pages at once, the dock with SkyNote, and other apps available when not using MX, "Find in Page" etc. Why should I give those essential features up because someone tells me MX5 is better?

(I regularly use Firefox for one charity I am involved with and Chrome for the charity I currently chair. The advantages of these being separated from my personal browser are enormous - particularly in ensuring passwords for things like PayPal etc don't get mixed up. Each browser can host a different identity. and having Sky Note available via MX dock to all browsers means I can easily share and transport research papers etc required for the writing I do in connection with the charities.)

I have been into computing for 37 years. I think I am able to judge what elements I find most useful and which seem to have been sacrificed in the name of progress.

Unless and until the features from MX4 I require are reinstated in MX5, whether or not Maxthon continue to support their old browser, I'll continue to use it.

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1 hour ago, robichris said:

MX dock and "Find in page".

Interesting to hear of someone who actually found the dock feature worth using. Find in page is there and does work though.

1 hour ago, robichris said:

Why should I give those essential features up because someone tells me MX5 is better?

You shouldn't. But remember that 4.4.8 (i think as Dock wasn't in 4.9 to my knowledge), is really old. Old core, no longer get updates. If it works for you keep using it. Just don't expect it to work well with some websites.

1 hour ago, robichris said:

and having Sky Note available via MX dock to all browsers means I can easily share and transport research papers etc required for the writing I do in connection with the charities.)

Personally i'd be using something like OneNote, although I can see why SkyNote is your choice. It's clean, light and handy. Although OneNote is more fully featured and has the ability to work on any device without having to install MX on each one.

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3 hours ago, robichris said:

(I regularly use Firefox for one charity I am involved with and Chrome for the charity I currently chair. The advantages of these being separated from my personal browser are enormous - particularly in ensuring passwords for things like PayPal etc don't get mixed up. Each browser can host a different identity. and having Sky Note available via MX dock to all browsers means I can easily share and transport research papers etc required for the writing I do in connection with the charities.)

 

I was going to suggest multiple accounts in Maxthon until I realized you may need to access them simultaneously which would not possible with M5.

Another reason M2 was so wonderful, multiple accounts with multiple sessions at once.

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Thanks for your comments 7Twenty & PHYR.

I have found MX Dock is one of the most valuable things about MX. From whatever I am working on at the time - be it emails, research papers, website creation, or writing a manuscript using any of my browsers, wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc., having the skynote, Google keep, diary, calculator, url shortener all available at a single click is really useful.

I do like being able to right click my mouse and use "Find in page" which I didn't see in my MX5 evaluation. It is particulalrly useful when checking through a research paper and wanting to check a reference immediately.

Of course there are some slight inconveniences not present with newer browsers: my Google mail account keeps telling me this version of Chrome (sic) is not supported and recommending I upgrade. I cannot use the mouse scroll button to zoom on Google maps, videos don't run on Twitter and a couple of websites I use don't work on it telling me it's out of date. It was in the hope these minor annoyances worked that I upgraded. However, unless or until the dock feature is reinstated, I'll stick with MX 4.

Re Skynote, I have used various alternatives previously, including OneNote, but skynote's there and so convenient. In it's old form, I can select anything quickly and more conveniently than through favourites' folders. Those few seconds each time all add up.

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7 hours ago, robichris said:

I do like being able to right click my mouse and use "Find in page" which I didn't see in my MX5 evaluation. It is particulalrly useful when checking through a research paper and wanting to check a reference immediately.

There isn't a "find in page" option from the context menu in MX5, but neither was there in MX4 as far as I could see. But you can add a gesture to open find which is the same as it always has been.

7 hours ago, robichris said:

having the skynote, Google keep, diary, calculator, url shortener all available at a single click is really useful.

To me the dock is just a duplication of the taskbar. So i'm unsure why most or all of those options can't be added to the windows taskbar. I'm not saying that is what you should do, just curious why that isn't an option.

Only issue would be skynote/maxnote which would require some change of your processes to use.

To me, moving to MX5 should have more benefits than sticking with MX4, if only for better website compatibility. But obviously your workflow may not allow that.

Also remember that Maxnote can be popped out (Ctrl+G) like SkyNote did.

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Thanks to everyone for their help.

I have finally managed to reconcile everything. I have managed to keep MX Dock whilst using MX5. (I just have a superfluous MX5 sidebar.) But I ma able to keep those apps and notes availble when using other browsers and wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc.

I know I could have added them to the taskbar but that gets overcrowded as it is. I'd also thought of leaving a small bit of the desktop visible with those icons but that wouldn't work properly and I actually like to keep my desktop uncluttered.

At least Gmail doesn't tell me to upgrade, Google maps permits scrolling and Trainline lets me use the browser. I.m sure (because everyone tells me so) that MX5 must be better than MX4 - not too sure why. But I must remember to use CTRL +F to Find in Page rather than right clicking. Other than that, and getting used to how to scroll to any of the most frequently used page links, I think I've got where I wanted.

Image 160.jpg

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50 minutes ago, robichris said:

(I just have a superfluous MX5 sidebar.)

You can disable it from the menu. View > Sidebar

50 minutes ago, robichris said:

. I.m sure (because everyone tells me so) that MX5 must be better than MX4 - not too sure why

You pretty much said why, sites don't complain that the browser is old etc. Should be reason enough.

50 minutes ago, robichris said:

I know I could have added them to the taskbar but that gets overcrowded as it is

Change the Cortana box to just an Icon or remove it completely. You'll gain more taskbar space without losing any functionality of Cortana,

50 minutes ago, robichris said:

But I must remember to use CTRL +F to Find in Page rather than right clicking

Did you try this:

23 hours ago, 7twenty said:

There isn't a "find in page" option from the context menu in MX5, but neither was there in MX4 as far as I could see. But you can add a gesture to open find which is the same as it always has been.

But nice work figuring out how to get things working as you wanted. Now that you mentioned it I do recall the Dock actually being a separate program to the browser. So there's no need to worry about MX5 conflicting with the older version. Although are you using MaxNote in place of SkyNote now?  or did you figure out something else to have that working as well?

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Sorry. Back to the drawing board.

Although I can have the MX Dock showing alongside MX5, I cannot use it when MX5 is running. I can use it when any other browser is running but as soon as I start MX5, any oened MX dock applications close and it sits there uselessly.

And half of the pages I have in Skynote did not migrate to Maxnote. This is potentially disastrous to me. I am composing a revision of an encyclopaedia I had published last year for the second edition that will probably be published in about 4 or 5 months time. I rely on SkyNote to keep those notes and have them instantly available via MX dock when I move away from the research pages in the browser to the word processor.

And other ideas of using the tasbar are a no-go as, even minimising Cortana, when I have pages open the taskbar is full of important links.

As I concluded previously, it looks as if unless or until Maxthon reintroduce the MX dock, I'll have to abandon MX5 and return to MX4.

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4 hours ago, robichris said:

Although I can have the MX Dock showing alongside MX5, I cannot use it when MX5 is running. I can use it when any other browser is running but as soon as I start MX5, any oened MX dock applications close and it sits there uselessly.

If a dock is that important then there are plenty of options available - Rocketdock, ObjectDock, Winstep Nexus - from a quick google. But unless there's a way to isolate the Dock from the actual browser I don't think looking further into it is an option. And even so, SkyNotes is part of MX4, so even having the Dock available isn't going to fix the problem of having notes available. And because you can't run SkyNote without MX4, you also can't run MX5 as you can't have more than one Maxthon instance running.

So it seems that online notes is the real issue. Moving to something that isn't locked down to a superseded browser is probably a better option. A quick search came up with simplenote.com/ Looks like a decent option and can be accessed by almost any device. Probably something that i'd be looking at if I wasn't using OneNote.

As I see it you have 3 options:

Stick with MX4.? and use everything as you have been with some issues on some websites knowing there (probably) won't be any major updates happening.
Move to MX5 and change your workflow including some programs to account for it. (or if you can get all you notes into Maxnote, just use that)
Move to another browser and keep using the Dock as you have noted.

Just don't expect the dock to return any time soon.

4 hours ago, robichris said:

And half of the pages I have in Skynote did not migrate to Maxnote

I thought I was the only one having this issue. Seems not so. It would be nice to figure out why that is the case - bad characters that can't be imported? or something else. Hopefully the MX dev's can look into this, as i'm sure anyone else in the same situation won't be happy.

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