For the past 9 months or so, I’ve been using an alternative browser to Internet Explorer called MyIE2. While it’s based on IE, it offers some very cool features that have become indispensible now – things like being able to open web pages in tabs rather than new windows, and a good ad popup blocker.
Last week, the successor to MyIE2 was announced – Maxthon. Other than the name change (sounds a bit like a brand of deodorant), Maxthon adds a range of new features including Unicode support. Although I’m trying Maxthon at the moment (1.0.0170 beta), I’ll stick with MyIE2 until the actual release version hits the street: the latest beta build is a little flaky still.
For non-IE browers, I’ve also been looking at Firefox, developed by Mozilla. Very polished browser, also with tabs. But I prefer MyIE2: that works for me.
What’s interesting here is that all of these alternate browsers are offering ‘experience features’ like tabbed web pages that look to be exactly what people want. IE is definitely looking a little jaded now by comparison. What will Microsoft do? Maybe we’ll see some changes to it in Windows XP SP2, now due out in August.