Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE) is a browser that reportedly has 30% of the browser market in its home country of China, second only to IE and ahead of Firefox. It is a powerful tabbed, fully customizable and 100% free Internet browser built on top of Microsoft"s Internet Explorer (IE) platform. The milestone Maxthon 2.0 beta was released early last month. We carried out an in-depth interview with SVP & Partner at Maxthon Netanel Jacobsson (former Business Development Director at AOL/ICQ), who told us the full story of this exciting browser and its bid for global success.
The History of Maxthon
The interview starts with a bit of history about Maxthon, a browser generally not well known in the Western world. Netanel said that MyIE was originally created by a Chinese man called Changyou, who wanted to customize his IE browser. MyIE became the first browser to support tabbed browsing. Changyou posted most of the code onto his BBS, but unexpectedly left the project due to personal reasons in 2000. Luckily, one of his admirers Jeff Chen decided to continue the development and released a new version with the name MyIE2. MyIE2 grew very fast, with massive contributions from passionate users all over the world. They communicated via BBS, Forums and IM - and helped on developing the plugins, sites, skins, debugging, etc.