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If there's a solid browser out there that gets less coverage than Opera, it's got to be Maxthon. After testing out the latest alpha build of version 3, it appears that they're going to make sure people start taking notice. Witness the V8 benchmark score above - that's Maxthon on the left and Chrome 4.0.203.2 on the right. As you can see, Maxthon 3 puts up pretty competitive numbers. In practical surfing on my core web apps and sites? It's just as fast as Chrome, if not just a hair faster. What's responsible for the big change? Well, prior versions of Maxthon had used the Trident engine from Internet Explorer. While that meant Maxthon was good at handling IE-friendly pages that didn't work so well on other browsers, it came at the price of last-generation performance. With WebKit now under the hood, Maxthon 3 looks likes it's ready to make some serious noise. Enthusiasts, get ready - this is going to be a fun year when it comes to browsers. Many of the core features you'd want in an everyday browser aren't working yet in Maxthon, but if you want to take it for a spin anyway you can download it from Maxthon's forums.
Tags: alpha, maxthon, webkit