“You raised my hopes and dashed them quite expertly, sir! Bravo!"

I downloaded Maxthon while recovering from surgery. So I was bored. My computer is from mid 2010 I think. A little sluggish,so I was on the hunt for light-weight browsers. Fast, reliable, fairly secure (I worry less about security because I wouldn’t personally rely on a web browser alone to be secure with my data — which turned out to be okay because I didn’t feel that there were a lot of security features to be found here. This did not bother me at all.)

Anyway. when I say this is — or was — a lightweight app, what I mean to say is that it had the footprint of a really, really small toolshed relative to the footprint of say — a large medical facility {Safari, for instance) or a ridiculously World War 1 bunker — ineffeciency and all — (I think we know what explorer of the internet that metaphor speaks to), you get the idea. Activity monitor gives me a reading of about 115MB of memory usage for Safari while it’s “at rest”. To compare - I think opera starts at 421 (seriously) and keeps rising until my laptop starts to smolder (less serious). Maxthon rests with an astonishing 17MB of memory consumed. This is not an error. That’s Seventeen. Too good to be true, you say? We’ll see.

Well, it’s not too good to be true, as it were — but what seems to happen, while maxthon jumps up to a still-respectable-consumtion of about 90MB of memory — There’s a couple of “helpers” that seem to fire up with it while browsing and these are ///enormous///. Like — nevermind the WWi bunker. They eat up so much RAM that I — a human being at rest in front of a computer — will get sleepy just imagining how hard the-little-memory-sticks-that-can’t-but-will-try-until-they-explode are working. I think the total memory consumption if I’m watching something on youtube (or listening to it) and reading a long article can be as high as 1.4GB.

I’m going to give the app 3 stars anyway. This might be an issue with my configurations somehow. It could be something I need to look at more carefully. Plus, this app loads web pages faster than any browser I’ve used before. Remember when you first got a cable/T1/whatever modem that isn’t dial-up and you were stunned at the speed? Kinda like that. It’s efficient that way. It’s very nice to look at. Great support community. It’s really a great app. I hope the memory consumption is fixable, because It will absolutely be my go-to browser. Based on how well everything else works, and that it’s bloody free — give it a try for yourself and see how it goes.

Sam saaaaammmmm about Maxthon Web Browser