Maxthon or Avant?

[sri]

Although my primary browser is Firefox and sometimes Opera, I still have to use IE for intranet.

I am looking for a light weight IE based tabbed browser that has session restore feature. Can anyone tell me which among Maxthon and Avant is lighter on system resources?

[Nxqd3051990]

Plz, let give a try with Maxthon. I love Maxthon Asia's browser ^^

[sri]

I am already using Maxthon. I don't find it heavy or anything...But curious about Avant as well.

[f0dder]

I used Avant back in the IE days, gave Maxthon a try a bit later but preferred Avant - can't give any qualified reasons why, though.

[muntealb]

The lightest on resources is GreenBrowser, an IE clone similar to Maxthon or Avant.

http://www.morequick.com/indexen.htm

[Curt]

I use both Avant and Maxthon (both 1.6 and 2), but prefer Maxthon 1.6 Classic.
However, I would say Avant surely is the lighter one on resources, and also the fastest.

[muntealb]

Maxthon 2 and Avant 11 use similar resources, this can be confirmed by monitoring them with Windows Task Manager (actually in my tests Maxthon uses less memory than Avant).

Avant may be marginally faster (not in my opinion), but that's probably because Maxthon has a powerful Ad Blocker and blocks a lot of the publicity before rendering the page.

[Curt]

Ohh.. yes... I forgot to think of the many add'ons I have installed in Maxthon. Sorry!

[Nxqd3051990]

Yay, think about plugins and features . Maxthon is better

[MrCrispy]

I used to be a diehard MAxthon user before I switched to Firefox 2. If all you're looking for is IE compatibility, try an extension like 'IE tab' or 'IE Tab lite' which will use the IE rendering engine in Firefox. I don't know of any Maxthon extension that doesn't have a FF equivalent, so I don't feel the need to switch.

[Armando]

try an extension like 'IE tab' or 'IE Tab lite' which will use the IE rendering engine in Firefox.

That's what I do too.

[Perry Mowbray]

try an extension like 'IE tab' or 'IE Tab lite' which will use the IE rendering engine in Firefox.

That's what I do too.

Ditto 

Although, I've used both as well, but ended up a Maxthon only user before switching to FireFox2. IETab works great for me.

[dantheman]

AVANT is probably a bit faster than Maxthon2 but the later probably has the fastest integrated downloader on the market. Like, i downloaded OpenOffice in less than 12 minutes once. Something that would normally take about 40 min. with other browsers.

[Lashiec]

AVANT is probably a bit faster than Maxthon2 but the later probably has the fastest integrated downloader on the market. Like, i downloaded OpenOffice in less than 12 minutes once. Something that would normally take about 40 min. with other browsers.

Ah, I see Maxthon's download manager has support for multipart downloads, that explains those speeds. Instead of stablishing a sole connection to the download server, the program shares equal chunks of the file between various connections, so the speed is combined.

[dantheman]

@Lashiec,

Glad you found the technical reasons for this.
Wonder if Firefox or Opera will ever pickup on it?
Firefox3B5 is probably the fastest yet in the Mozilla family but with this Maxthon2,
i must admit that i'm mighty tempted to make a switch.

[nontroppo]

Ah, I see Maxthon's download manager has support for multipart downloads, that explains those speeds. Instead of stablishing a sole connection to the download server, the program shares equal chunks of the file between various connections, so the speed is combined.

Huh? I've never understood this. You have a fixed bandwidth, so if your bandwidth is X and you open 1 HTTP connection to it it will use X. If you open 2 connections then each connection uses X/2. This has been well tested for general HTTP protocols where opening more connections is only useful IF one connection stalls (read the technical benchmarks on HTTP/1.1 and pipelining). But otherwise, the overhead of having to maintain several connections makes a single connection faster in a reliable scenario. Having tested multi-connection downloaders on stable connections, I never got one conclusive download that was faster than a single connection (that was a few years ago). I think multi-connection downloaders are only of benefit in specific cases (even less useful than HTML loading where there are several co-dependent resources that are needed, file downloading is independent per file). Any more recent definitve controlled benchmarks on this?

[NomenNescio]

Ah, I see Maxthon's download manager has support for multipart downloads, that explains those speeds. Instead of stablishing a sole connection to the download server, the program shares equal chunks of the file between various connections, so the speed is combined.

Not multipart , but multisource - P2P even.
Read up at http://blog.maxthon.com/?p=82

Huh? I've never understood this. You have a fixed bandwidth, so if your bandwidth is X and you open 1 HTTP connection to it it will use X.

That's assuming that your download speed is not faster than the upstream bandwidth allocated to each download by wherever you download from. Of course on faster connections the limiting factor may well become your 100Mbit network interface or your HDD speed.

[wellofsouls]

The lightest on resources is GreenBrowser, an IE clone similar to Maxthon or Avant.

http://www.morequick.com/indexen.htm

actually, the lightest on resources with a Trident core, and possibly the lightest on resource with a GUI, is MiniIE

http://www.miniie.com/

unfortunately it's all in chinese...

[dantheman]

...Not multipart , but multisource - P2P even.
Read up at http://blog.maxthon.com/?p=82

Good point!
Guess people still to need to keep their AV programs on hand.

[NomenNescio]

actually, the lightest on resources with a Trident core, and possibly the lightest on resource with a GUI, is MiniIE

Well well, actually I think that title might belong to Winamp minibrowser
The lowest resource "full" browser utilizing Trident OTOH might well be either Scope or Networker.
Granted, neither has been updated in half a decade (MiniIE isn't exactly up-to-date either) and don't have native Mouse Gestures (so use eg. StrokeIT), but like Classic Maxthon, do have the option to use both Trident and Gecko.

Scope is fully portable (unpacks with 7z , .ini files stored in program dir), Networker a little less (unpacks with UniExctract, stores settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/famel/networker/ )

As neither is listed at evolt.org browser archive or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers :

Scope: http://cyberian.tripod.com/Scope.htm , http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Scope/984724962/1
Networker: http://www.geocities.com/famelstudio/

[wellofsouls]

actually, the lightest on resources with a Trident core, and possibly the lightest on resource with a GUI, is MiniIE

Well well, actually I think that title might belong to Winamp minibrowser
The lowest resource "full" browser utilizing Trident OTOH might well be either Scope or Networker.
Granted, neither has been updated in half a decade (MiniIE isn't exactly up-to-date either) and don't have native Mouse Gestures (so use eg. StrokeIT), but like Classic Maxthon, do have the option to use both Trident and Gecko.

Scope is fully portable (unpacks with 7z , .ini files stored in program dir), Networker a little less (unpacks with UniExctract, stores settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/famel/networker/ )

As neither is listed at evolt.org browser archive or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers :

Scope: http://cyberian.tripod.com/Scope.htm , http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Scope/984724962/1
Networker: http://www.geocities.com/famelstudio/

Huh? what do you mean by "MiniIE isn't exactly up-to-date"? From the link I provided :
http://www.miniie.com/
you can see that the latest logged update is as new as April 9, 2008 @ 1.5.240, and the program itself actually get DAILY online update, the latest being 1.5.788 @ May 12, 2008. I don't know what can be called more "up-to-date"

Also I take it that the "light on resource" here means memory usage, then both Scope and Networker takes much more resource than MiniIE, I have personally done a memory usage comparison here :
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=634949

you'll see MiniIE takes less than 2M memory at startup, and less than 3M with MSN open.

Both Scope and Networker take more than 5M at startup, and more than 20M with MSN open. Both of them are also susceptible to the memory leak test.

If you are looking for a browser that takes less disk space or with better portability, then I suggest you take a look at the Donut family from Japan.

[iphigenie]

don't have native Mouse Gestures

I never understood mouse gestures - first thing i disable in any software.

I tend to move my mouse when i think or do things -i guess its like doodling- and that triggers stuff at random. 

[dantheman]

Geeze, i wonder which browser SRI finally opted for?

Maxthon seems to also have some security related options that AVANT does not. Personally, i've been deeper into latest Opera (9972) which by default is most secure than any on the market (least that's what i am told).

[sri]

I am continuing to use Maxthon for now.

[Curt]

... From the link I provided : http://www.miniie.com/ you can see th...

... I suggest you take a look at the Donut family from Japan.

- this is confusing me:
You imply that you read Chinese but suggests we should look at something from Japan. 

Besides, their site is not listing any version numbers to be read in Arabic (Latin) digits.

Edit:
And whatsmore: I have maybe 700 fonts, but miniIE has not chosen to use any of them...