A very, very nifty add-on to Internet Explorer which makes your web experience nearly like Opera’s — secure, tabbed and configurable! Here’s holding the glass to MyIE2 (now called Maxthon), and seeing how the two compare..
A very, very nifty add-on to Internet Explorer which makes your web experience nearly like Opera’s — secure, tabbed and configurable! Here’s holding the glass to MyIE2, and seeing how it matches up to Opera..the browser that clearly seems to have inspired MyIE2 (now called Maxthon) in the first place. The student challenges the teacher!
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is inadvertently the most “popular” browser — in numbers at least — but since it is basically free (read: unlucrative) MS has decided to dump the IE browser. In the wake of such complacence from MS, a clutch of other snazzy browsers have sprung up — Mozilla, Firebird, etc from the Gecko family, and most notably Opera. All of them are more standards compliant, secure, faster, configurable etc etc. Well, all that sort of changes with the release of an ubernifty MyIE2 wrapper to IE!
First, get a load of the features
It is a nice little tweakable sarong for IE. I wonder if it has the malleability that one has come to expect of Opera, but hey, who tweaks everything! Tabs are neat (have existed before in CrazyBrowser as well) but my minor quibble is that the tabs font cannot be edited — and the font sizes are small, intentionally perhaps to save screen real estate — although I am allowed to bold the Active Tab text etc. What is really neat though is that I can close tabs in a number of ways: by double-clicking the tab (and clicks are customizable). It sports a bunch of shortcuts and the beauty is in the growing array of plugins!
IE was slow, irritatingly slow after you have used Opera. This is especially true if you are subjected to slower connection speeds (as I recently was, when in a remote Indian city.) Somehow MyIE2 seems a touch faster than IE but below the hood it is the same beast. Opera’s rendering engine is unmatched.
IE had pop-up blockers utils galore. Even Google Toolbar does it. But MyIE2 implements this with great flourish and allows you to customize it on a per-site basis!
MyIE2 brings skinnability to the vanilla world of IE. There are some cool skins because it is easy to develop them. Personally though, I prefer a skinless MyIE2, and Opera with the “Win” skin which is really simple. Skinned behemoths such as Neoplanet have taught me that KISS is indeed a very critical concept, but we digress.
IE did not have a cool forum where people actually get solution to their woes and gripes. MyIE2 introduces community to IE. (Btw, Opera does this fabulously, plus IRC!)
Things I love about Opera
- Simple but thoughtful thingies like Notes, “Paste and go” etc. These things are simply too many to enlist here, the proof is in the pudding. Once you use Opera, you get addicted. (Addendum: please read comments below for how to achieve this in MyIE2.)
- A totally customizable search interface (only a search.ini away) that makes it easy to have your own shortcuts e.g., dictionary, vivisimo, amazon, ebay etc. MyIE2 does give you a search bar (hint: CTRL E) which *is* customizable but geeks wouldn’t settle for anything lesser than *.ini files, now would they!
- I can change font-size in Opera with a simple 9 or 0. I can get back to normal with a 6. Nothing similar in MyIE2, although they tell me that if I had a “num pad” (the right hand side numbers thingie on regular keyboards) then I could achieve this with CTRL + and CTRL -, but I have a laptop. Sizing in Opera is actually pixel-based which means images, flash movies etc are all sized along with the text seamlessly.
- Opera: switching between personal style sheet and the page style sheet is a cinch. This is simply not easy in MyIE2 although a plugin would solve it.
- Print Preview in Opera is unmatched (“p”). MyIE2’s print preview is still the same as IE: ugly. Btw, if a “media=print” stylesheet is specified in the web page, Opera’s print preview will show you the printout accordingly. Is this useful, or is this useful!
- One minor feature of Opera that has been a life saver for me on many occasions is that when you are typing something in a form, then you inadvertently click to another page, and then come BACK, your form input is still retained. In IE, Mozilla etc, what you were entering in the form is vamoose. I love Opera for this feature alone!
- Opera’s password wand is more intuitive and less obstrusive, IMHO, than RoboForm that comes shipped with MyIE2. I particularly don’t like the popup window of Roboform, with further pop-up menus (e.g., on the button “NEVER”). Somehow Opera is also better at figuring out when to leave me alone — e.g., on an HTTPS website.
- Say what you will, the download engine of Opera remains the one to beat, without the need of any additional download accelerators or managers (e.g., DAP)
- IE doesn’t support zillions of standards, so by extension nor does MyIE2. Still.
- Tweak-freaks love the customizability, and PORTABILITY of Opera’s configurations. It’s all in one INI file.
- Speaking of portability, Opera works on all conceivable OSes. I can use my same settings at home at work, at friends’ etc etc.
- MyIE2 is secure, but you need to steelwire it by disabling ActiveX etc. It surely makes the process MUCH easier than IE. Yet, security-wise Opera is unbeatable.
- Window history — if you inadvertently close a window that you were surfing and want to get it back, Opera gives you a windows history. Just CTRL ALT Z away (or Window — > Closed) and you can resume any Windows from your current session. MyIE2 also provides something similar (see below.)
- Also read: Why Opera?
Where MyIE2 really shines
- It’s free
(had to get it out of my system) - For me, this is a killer-app idea: the “BOSS” feature! You can assign a key combination (in my case CTRL Z because the two keys are so close together) which when pressed just totally makes MyIE2 disappear from the screen — very useful if you really have a nasty boss! When you press these keys again, the whole MyIE2 reappears, tags and windows and all. Marvellous!
- A bevy of plugins from weather to image sizing!
- Because it is IE, when you COPY text from a web page, it copies the text along with the formatting plus the images, which you can then PASTE into an email or a document. Many users may find this very useful! Opera and Mozilla will not pick up the formatting or the images, which I personally find useful at times when I just need the text. YMMV.
- An “Undo” function for Windows history. If you close a window, and regret it, you can always “undo” and reopen it. MyIE2 maintains the history. Super.
- Groups: like sessions in Opera, or folders on your personal bar. If you have a folder on your personal toolbar (instead of just links) in Opera, you can “Open all folder items” and all your bookmarks in that folder are opened automatically in new windows of their own. MyIE2 achieves this functionality a similar GROUP function, and you can specify groups quite easily. What is really nifty in MyIE2 is to add the current window to any group. Just right-click on the tab, then “Send to” …this feature seems to me to be a lot handier than in Opera, where for sessions you’d have to have all previous session windows open, then open the current one, then save the session again. You can specify the group that MyIE2 STARTS with. Finally, accessing different groups is very simple — it’s a drop-down on the toolbar.
- As much as I hate to say this, unfortunately many websites are just plain developed with IE in mind. My corporate intranet for instance, and it is a VERY sophisticated one (ERP ring a bell?), uses ActiveX profusely. And frankly, if I wanted such functionality available from ANYWHERE in the world, in my browser, I’d rather have it exactly like this than to have Java applets or simple pages where everything uploads again and again. I’m sorry I cannot show you screenshots but in some ways there is a solid business case for why IE is a very, very powerful browser. (and no, making Opera identify itself as IE doesn’t do much )
- It doesn’t crash much. Opera does, truth be told. Yes, even version 7.23. Crashes many times daily, which btw I dont mind as it resumes where it left off when I restart it, and besides I love Opera too much. Yet, it needs to be mentioned as it is a clear brownie point in MyIE2’s favor.
- For many media files (e.g., on Amazon.com’s music samplers), Opera can be configured to launch the right app (which is why it is super flexible in the right hands) but it is not always easy for the layperson. MyIE2 has all the right associations built in because under its panties it is still really IE.
- Content filtering is nice. You have several options:
- Load Images
- Load Videos
- Load Sounds
- Allow Scripts
- Allow Java Applet
- Allow ActiveX
- Allow Flash
- AutoHide is very nice, although Opera can come close to this with some work.
- The personal toolbar also has proxies as a drop-down, which makes it easy to switch between proxies. In Opera, ALT P etc etc. More clicks away.
- Encoding is easy to switch too. At least 2-3 clicks lesser than Opera. Speaking of encoding, IE simply *is* better at showing multiple languages on Windows as long as the charset is specified in the page. In Opera I need to move between the EDIT — > ENCODING — > “Auto” mode to “Western” to “Shift_JIS” all the time.
- Pop-up blocking is quite sophisticated, based on individual sites and this included wildcard expressions. Get yourself Spybot Search & Destroy though, and enable their host file replacements!
- Ad-blocking is phenomenal. Although again, get Spybot.
- It supports Gecko rendering now, in version 0.9.12, but this makes page loading slower (for me — Windows XP Pro, Pentium 4 non-Centrino, 512 MB RAM.)
- A minor feature, but very useful for some news website etc: Autoscrolling.
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT:
Irrespective of the browser that you feel most comfortable with, the bar in the “IE camp” has certainly been raised!
Admittedly Opera’s rendering engine rocks (as does Firebird’s) and I’m patiently waiting for a component/control of some sort to be made (e.g., Adobe?) so developers can use the Opera rendering engine in their applications, since it is faster, more secure, and uses less memory.
Personally, I am somewhat ball and chain attached to Opera still, although for surfing those notorious banking websites that follow the lame “We only support IE” dictum, MyIE2 is certainly a more pleasant option. (P.S. With Opera > 7.23 this problem of non-IE support is a little better.)
But for most people who use IE, or your uncles who’d have their zippers in knots if you were to ask them to switch from their default browser (the you-know-which), or for people who do not want to shell out the little cash it takes to buy Opera, MyIE2 is a very very decent, addictive, all-encompassing alternative. IE takes a lot of time to open new windows, MyIE2 doesn’t, so it offers a better overall surfing experience even without the whole features shebang.
Have I missed out on anything? Have I not explored either MyIE2 or Opera well enough? Penny for your thoughts!
This post is tagged Tools/Reviews
Still for Macs Frebird, Camino & Safari browsers do multi-tabs. IE5.x/Mac is still in the stone age!
