Maxthon for Mac Review

With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer long out of the picture, Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have been left to duke it out in recent years, each one hoping to become the favored web browser of Mac users everywhere. Into this passionate combat comes Maxthon, which serves up a Chromium-based browser with a handful of unique features -- but are they enough for Mac users to abandon their favorites?

Despite having more than 130 million users on Windows, Android (including Kindle Fire and NOOK) and BlackBerry, Maxthon is largely unknown to Mac users -- until now. Having previously tested the Apple waters with an iPad version on the App Store, Maxthon finally arrives on the Mac, and for the most part ties neatly into the tablet version, as well as the variety of other platforms supported by the browser.

For those already using Chrome for Mac, Maxthon may not be quite a godsend -- it looks and behaves nearly identically to Google’s own browser, having been built upon the search giant’s open-source Chromium project. Maxthon offers similar support for extensions, plug-ins and add-ons, although at launch these are far more limited than Google’s virtual shelves. Available extensions include LastPass, Facebook Notifications and the rather comprehensive AddThis for sharing web pages with your social networks.

Like Chrome, one of Maxthon’s marquee features is the ability to play video files using preloaded standards -- no plugins necessary. To test this, we uninstalled Adobe Flash Player and visited a number of Flash sites around the web. These sites all worked exactly as expected, despite the absence of Adobe’s frequently criticized plug-in.

Maxthon mostly lives up to its bold speed claims, clocking 187.6ms on the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark; however, Chrome 20 trumped that with 154.1ms and Apple’s latest Safari 6 running under OS X Mountain Lion performed better yet at 149.0ms. The story was virtually the same with Peacekeeper, ranking Maxthon third at 3906, Chrome second with 3792 and Safari 6 again the champ at 2498.

One of Maxthon’s stronger traits is its ability to cloud sync tabs, history, favorites and settings across all of the platforms it supports. Users must first sign up for a free Maxthon Passport account using an email address, which assigns the user an all-numeric nickname reminiscent of the ICQ days -- but don’t worry, this is easily changed to any name you’d like in the profile section.

After signing in, bookmarks can be imported from your default browser (Safari 6, in our case), which are then synced to the cloud along with your other browser data. We installed Maxthon Web Browser for iPad and also the Android version on a Nexus 7 and within moments of signing in, our bookmarks appeared there as well, ready to browse. We had less luck syncing open tabs from the Mac to these mobile devices, however.

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