miércoles, 16 de abril de 2014

Maxthon, the New Browser on Linux Land

A while ago, a piece of news that stirred interest on the Linux community was the porting of Maxthon to Linux.

Maxthon is a browser.  I knew of its existence a while ago, when I learned that one of the kind readers of this blog used it to display one of my entries.

I visited Maxthon's main page, but was disappointed because the browser was (if a recall correctly) based on Internet Explorer and, as I had anticipated, did not support Linux.

So, I lost all interest on this browser altogether.

But then came the news that Maxthon now supports Linux.  Again, interest sparked and I visited the page again expecting only .deb packages for Ubuntu.

However, I was pleased to see that they also offered .rpm packages.  I accepted their EULA (Maxthon is NOT free software) and installed the .rpm to both my Mageia 3 desktop
and laptop.

The installation was simple and straight-forward.  I was almost ready to find out what a "cloud browser" is.

When I fired up Maxthon, a Chromium-reminiscent browser took the screen.  Yes, Maxthon looked extremely similar to Chromium.  In fact, it identifies itself as Chromium, not Maxthon, which is a problem because you cannot use certain services on the main page:  it says that you must have Maxthon to be able to use them (?!)

The browser claimed to be fast.  I did not see that speed until I registered a Maxthon passport account.   Once you do that, the browser rewards your activity, your completion of personal information, loading up of a picture, etc.


Maxthon for Linux running on Mageia 3 64 bits
To be honest, the idea of the the benefits of a cloud browser still eludes me.  Yet, I am glad to have another option for browsing the web.

1 comentario:

  1. I still do not understand the concept, either. If you have to download and install it, what exactly makes it different from regular browsers? How exactly is that a "cloud" browser?

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