Maxthon Scams Its Score In The HTML5Test.com

By | July 5, 2012


Maxthon Scams Its Score In HTML5Test.comThinks that they can outsmart everyone else.

When you start bundling crap with your web browser, you know that there is something fundamentally wrong with your priorities. So, what do you do when you have already lost your dignity and suck at pretty much everything you do? You cheat, obviously.

After claiming that Maxthon scores a total of 467 points in the HTML5Test, Niels Leenheer has found out that this is not exactly the case. In fact, they enabled features that do not actually work, just to boost the meaningless score.

Niels wrote:

Dear @Maxthon, please do not enable webkit features that do not work. I’ve blacklisted your browser on WebGL, getUserMedia and subtitles.

Also @Maxthon please disable these features in the next version (unless they work) or I will remove Maxthon from html5test browser lists.

The latest version of Maxthon scores 422 points on html5test.com instead of 467. If you don’t support features, don’t claim you do!

You guys wanted publicity? Well, here you have it. Good job, Maxthon.

Update: Maxthon responds

[Thanks to everyone who sent this]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (28)

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  1. PO says:

    Made in China™

  2. Shane Bundy says:

    I saw this coming. It was everywhere on the Maxthon Forums and the devs decided not to listen. This is the result. Ouch.

    • chievements says:

      木有错,搞好用户体验可比跑什么分重要多了

      Yep,making a better user experience is much more important than getting a higher score like that.

  3. just another user says:

    the devs listen to nothing so this is the result – they say a racehorse is a camel designed by a committee – they must have lots of committees @ Maxthon 

  4. just another user says:

    and that should have been a camel is a racehorse designed by a committee – brain was not in gear

  5. Armin says:

    Hot damn, Vygantas is harsher to Maxthon than he is to Opera! D:

  6. duri says:

    The actual evil is not those lies in some (not very important) test but the fact they break Javascript feature detection on real websites. Just like with Chrome’s false positive on background-repeat: space|round, this is something web developers will hate Maxthon for.

  7. To good to be true!

  8. tomkaten says:

    Big surprise, I’ve been saying this for months… Huge HTML5test.com scores, awful support on real pages… Chinese vaporware.

  9. Ichann says:

    Hence why these “tests” are meaningless. Like those JavaScript benchmarks

    • Shane Bundy says:

      HTML5 isn’t even a finished standard, yet they insist that they can’t afford NOT to be good at it. So far I’ve seen poor graphics performance, broken WebGL capability and incomplete HTML5 support (as highlighted here).

      Benchmarks are useless, I prefer real-world tests like the good old “how longs does it take for example.com load?” and “how fast does the website perform its actions?”.

  10. Ruest says:

    “HTML5 test” is  a worthless site anyway.  Use http://caniuse.com instead for any of its purposes.

  11. Guest says:

    Typical China product, they don’t even write the code to the engines used, Webkit or Trident.

    • Shane Bundy says:

      Maxthon do write on top of WebKit, but I just wish that they would update the main core – Maxthon are still writing on top of WebKit 535.12 (the latest is 537.2) and I think if they updated it then they might have avoided this mess.

  12. Wei Wang says:

    Shame on you @Maxthon:twitter

    • Shane Bundy says:

      Everyone’s made mistakes somewhere. Remember Firefox 13’s New Tab page exposing sensitive information or Chrome’s RLZ tracking?

      Also, WebKit even claims that it can support CSS3’s background-repeat but it can’t really, yet nobody seems to complain about that.

    • chievements says:

      何必呢,html5test这个站本身就不严谨,同样的浏览器,不同的user agent分数就大不一样。看你ID,直接用中文了,应该能看懂。

  13. Duowell says:

    Niels Leenheer ‏@rakaz
    To be fair, I never claimed @Maxthon was cheating. I always considered poor Q&A to be responsible. I just pushed them to fix it asap.

  14. Gusest says:

    360chrome is gooder than Maxthon

    • chievements says:

      请问你是何方神圣?英语里面有gooder这个词吗?

      Wher are you from?I’m wondering if there is the word ‘gooder’ in English.

      • Tiancaigaohua says:

        = =谁知到呢…我可不觉得360比傲游好到哪去,照样chrome内核,就是支持个摄像头罢了…谁知到有木有安全风险呢

    • KKKLD says:

      搞笑吧

  15. Mehran says:

    I also found out that many css3 features that “The CSS3 Test” shows that Maxthon supports (and is already supported by Chrome) does not work! When I reported that in their forums, they told me that their developers will look into it, but they never answered!

    I’ve just uninstalled it and never ever waste my time on Chinese sugarcoated lies!! 

    • apád anyád says:

      Now that’s interesting. Someone should really look into this Maxthon, how much of the browser’s supports is a lie.