After a while toying with Firefox 2, IE 7 and the Windows version of Apple's Safari, this week I've reacquainted myself with an old friend: Maxthon - my favourite web browser.

For older readers who remember DOS shells and Windows shells, Maxthon is, strictly speaking, an IE shell. Yet it has its own interface and features and is, for all intents and purposes, a separate browser in its own right.

Maxthon pioneered tabbed browsing. That feature has been widely imitated, of course, but only Maxthon forces a new tab every time you click on one of your Favourites, or an icon on your links bar. I hate always having to open a blank tab in Firefox or IE before I surf to a new site (if there's a workaround I'm missing, please tell me ... and I don't include opening every single link on every single site on a new tab). Maxthon also makes it easy to choose the root menu for your links, if you're the type of person who, like me, likes to festoon their browser bar with link buttons (see screen shot below). Its icon management seems up the spout, but you can still fit many more website's icons on your links bar, which I like.

And if you don't like IE's stuttering auto-scroll through a Favourites list that's too long to fit on your screen, you'll like the way Maxthon instantly displays all your Favourites over two columns.

As someone who often uses text macros triggered by key combinations (for example, common HTML commands - the better to force you lovely people to open a new browser window when you click on any of my links - or Ctrl-Alt-A to fill my wife' email address onto a web mail address bar - it's much faster than typing it in full or selecting it from an Address Book), I really, really, really appreciate Maxthon's option to run off its bevy of default shortcut keys. I've found no equivalent switch-off option in Firefox or IE, though again I'm happy to be enlightened.

Maxthon was also a pioneer in mouse gestures, such as moving your mouse up and down to refresh a page - again, a feature that's been widely imitated since. This feature actually drives me crazy and I promptly disabled it upon re-installing Maxthon. But there's a lot else to like. To take a couple of random examples (of many): it's simple to adjust your security level, or clean your browsing history, and you can set up URL aliases (that is, a word you type instead of a URL to surf to a site). And Maxthon snaps along, loading web pages quickly thanks to some aggressive caching.

The downside: I found the first version more crash-happy than Firefox or IE, and Maxthon2 seems more unstable, averaging a couple of freezes a day. Still, if you're open to expanding your browser horizon, check it out here.