A farewell from a loyal user...


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So finally, the day has come. My journey with Maxthon has come to an end, sadly but inevitable.

Over the last months or rather the last year or so, my experience with Maxthon has become worse and even worse. It began with the soul-selling 'let every ad through cause ads cannot be annoying' crap we all know as AdBlock Plus allowing more and more ads to be displayed, rendering two of my most used websites basically unusable as, after the page takes ages to load, just in the moment you want to click on an article the ads suddenly load moving the whole site's content down a couple of hundred pixels and leaving me clicking the wrong article. So then 'last page', wait five more seconds of my life for the page to load and mostly repeat because I fail to click the right article again. The only page where ADB has worked fine so far is YouTube. With no uBlock for Maxthon in sight I resigned with that.

Then came the perennial not-loading of pages either displaying little to nothing or a cluttered mess of letters, paragraphs and incorrect rendered HTML elements. As a simple reload fixed this, I was okay with that. But no stop there! At startup Maxthon took almost ten seconds to load. Not only the first start after booting Windows, every start if I happened to close the browser. I can imagine this beeing at least partly caused by the fact that I have a pretty big collection of bookmarks and so on and this alone wouldn't have been that big of an issue, but about every three to four times or so, Maxthon would completely crash at startup resulting in me having to kill the process via task manager. This was frustrating, to say the least.

But none of this has so far stopped me from using Maxthon. I really loved this browser and I still do, but at this point I had to make a cut. The problem with the ads, fine; the loading issues and reoccurring crashes, fine. This couldn't stop me from using my favourite browser with the most intriguing UI of all browser I have used to this date, the features I am used to and all the memories I connect to it. Maxthon was my entrance to the Internet. Admittedly not that long ago, but still this was my first real browser. Yes, the first two or three steps I did with the bad old IE, but then I clicked on the browserchoice.eu link and found Maxthon, it was love at first sight. So I started out with Maxthon 3, boy that good old days. After a couple of months there was the switch to Cloud Browser, which was by far the best iteration with that speed and features no other browser had to offer. The sky was the limit, literally. Then came Maxthon 5 and I, well I didn't switch. I didn't fully trust the new system and as I have become some kind of power user, who was and still is reliant on his collection of shortcuts (well, at least a part of it), I wasn't completely sure if everything would work seamlessly. So I waited. About one year after the release of Maxthon 5 I finally switched. Not without some minor problems of course.

I settled with every deficiency of Maxthon, endured every problem Maxthon would throw at me. But I knew that one day the last straw for me to finally break up with Maxthon will come. And this day was wednesday, the 4th of September 2019. I was just about to order something from an online shop I never ordered something from before. Unaware of any problem I might face I put everything into the shopping card, created an account and proceeded to checkout. I chose PayPal as payment option, hit 'buy now' and then... the page crashed. As I hadn't received any confirmation email, I placed the order again, this time using Firefox. I later received a confirmation for the first order, but I was able to cancel it without any problem.

So it was an issue like any issue before, but this time it was the last issue for me with Maxthon. It's enought. I am now using Firefox as it's the best alternative for me. I have configured it to work and look mostly as I want. I can close tabs by double clicking, I have an extension to restore closed tabs and I am able to move it to the left next to the reload button (looking at you, Chrome) and most importantly I have an extension which lets me search for anything I have marked by just dragging and dropping it anywhere on the screen. I also went to Firefox Color and made a theme with exactly the standard color of the Maxthon top bar. Though I put some red accent color into it. It's called 'Maxthon 5 Theme' if somebody wants to know. The alleged pain of migrating all my bookmarks wasn't even that hard. I sorted out most of the stuff and now have about 150 bookmarks or so left. If I think about this beeing the main cause why I haven't switched earlier...

So lastly this is my farewell to Maxthon. I hope not forever, but I'm afraid it's probably forever. Unless there will be a completely revamped Maxthon 6 or maybe the code released to open source or so. But I'm really not optimistic in that regard.

So then, over and out.

Alex, Maxthon user from 19th Nov. 2012 till 4th Sep. 2019, Level 83 with 14,402 hours online.

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6 hours ago, MaxthonFan42 said:

Over the last months or rather the last year or so, my experience with Maxthon has become worse and even worse. It began with the soul-selling 'let every ad through cause ads cannot be annoying' crap we all know as AdBlock Plus allowing more and more ads to be displayed, rendering two of my most used websites basically unusable as, after the page takes ages to load, just in the moment you want to click on an article the ads suddenly load moving the whole site's content down a couple of hundred pixels and leaving me clicking the wrong article. So then 'last page', wait five more seconds of my life for the page to load and mostly repeat because I fail to click the right article again. The only page where ADB has worked fine so far is YouTube. With no uBlock for Maxthon in sight I resigned with that.

This is not Maxthon issue, this is Adblock Plus issue and its filters.  You can always add your own filters to block speciffic things on site.

6 hours ago, MaxthonFan42 said:

I have an extension to restore closed tabs and I am able to move it to the left next to the reload button (looking at you, Chrome)

Maxthon have it by default,  Maxthon menu -> Skins -> Toolbar -> Restore Last Closed Page (by pressin small arrow facing down you can see pages you closed and restore them easily). Its always was here.

I'm not defending Maxthon on its state (its outdated, little bit laggy, no themes, no extensions, something doesnt work how its supposed to) but I'm still using it, cause its more comfortable for me. I never liked Chrome and chrome based browsers and how Firefox works on some occasions. I really wish that devs answered to us what happens to our loved browser and why they cant provide us proper browser...

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5 hours ago, roguelike said:

This is not Maxthon issue, this is Adblock Plus issue and its filters.  You can always add your own filters to block speciffic things on site.

The issue is that there is practically no alternative to ABP in Maxthon. And you can believe me that I have tried every block list I found. ABP lets by their definition 'non intrusive' ads through, even if you flip the according switch off. And even if I succesfully blocked those ads, some days or weeks later the ad's domain changes and it's back again.

5 hours ago, roguelike said:

Maxthon have it by default,  Maxthon menu -> Skins -> Toolbar -> Restore Last Closed Page (by pressin small arrow facing down you can see pages you closed and restore them easily). Its always was here.

Maybe my feature list was a bit misleading there. What I wanted to say is that I can make Firefox work almost exactly as Maxthon (e.g. tab restoring button, double click to close tab and drag&drop search). With Chrome or Brave I am not able to do this.

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13 hours ago, MaxthonFan42 said:

So lastly this is my farewell to Maxthon. I hope not forever, but I'm afraid it's probably forever. Unless there will be a completely revamped Maxthon 6 or maybe the code released to open source or so. But I'm really not optimistic in that regard.

 

Mathon is already dead, a long time ago. He has been anchored in the past a lot, at least his cores, the development is almost null and what ends all this, is his community, which, practically has disappeared.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is rather disheartening as I kinda liked Maxthon as it worked well especially since I still use XP (before I get a lecture, I cannot afford to buy new software or a new computer). Sure, there were a few things that were a bit buggy like the laggy start of YouTube videos or the total lack of alternative ad blockers or the lack of extensions...or the incredibly long time Maxthon takes to load (I use the portable version)

But it was fairly decent.

Sadly I had to go to another browser which is far more user friendly and customizeable  while still offering some add ons and alternatives to adblockers rather than being forced to rely on just one. (lack of themes, personas and other extensions kinda got a bit dismaying too)

Maxthon was good while it lasted but it is sad to see the project was abandoned...maybe things will change and if not, I lend thanks to those involved in the project.

 

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