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Google + Maxthon = Hmmmm

Ok, I understand that Maxthon has a big following in China, and that Google wants to boost their traffic there. But Google taking a stake in Maxthon still seem strange to me; most of the features that made Maxthon attractive in the first place have been done better elsewhere, and particularly in the case of FireFox, have been done without Microsoft’s battered IE legacy code under the hood. Additionally, given that more and more browsing features (bookmarks, rss readers, etc.) are being transitioned into “the cloud” (del.icio.us, etc), how long will Maxthon remain an attractive proposition for consumers? The Maxthon website is prominently touting a bunch of previous generation features like tabbed browsing.

All of that being said, it will probably get Google the Chinese traffic fix they crave - let’s hope they have a strategy in place to convert browser-driven traffic into permanent Google users.

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