Today I want to talk about browsers. Now I know that the hot browser of the moment is Firefox, because of it’s tabbed browsing and built in popup blocking. And it’s great I guess. But I have honestly never liked Netscape/Mozilla based browsers. I like Internet Explorer. I know that is like a crazy thing to say. But those of you who like IE have a way of getting all of the nifty features of Firefox while using IE. It’s a free browser called Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE2) that is based on the IE rendering engine. Maxthon has just about everything you can want in a modern browser. It’s got tabbed browsing, plugins, and skins, mouse gestures, and a whole lot more. Plus it features a very handy popup blocker as well as content/ad filters.

I also like just some of the ways you can customize the way it works. For example in the options menu in the Maxthon Options there is a Search tab that allows you to do all kinds of nifty stuff. Like being able to setup special searches through the address bar. For example I can preface my text of choice with hb to search my site. It’s all very easy to setup. And I have custom search aliases for the IMDB, Dictionary.com. and the Camelot Herald character search.

Some of the plugins available are also what makes Maxthon my favorite browser. Flash Save is a perfect example. This plugin gives you the ability to view and save Flash files. Another one that is a must have is the Kill Flash Ad and Flying Ad plugin. This one does exactly what it says. You go to a site and one of those fucking annoying flash popups happen you just hit the button for the plugin and whammo it’s gone. Another cool one is for a bookmark script called SiteBar which I have running on my site here. This plugin lets you run this bookmark script in a sidebar. You can get this plugin that works with my SiteBar right here.