Google + Maxthon = $ 1 million?

    Google + Maxthon = $ 1 million?Michael Arrington, host of the Techcrunch blog, known for its responsiveness in spreading plausible rumors, today publishes a new piece of news from "around Google circles." According to information confirmed by several anonymous sources at once, the American company invested about $ 1 million in Maxthon browser developers  - in exchange for a share in their business.

    The Maxthon browser, developed jointly by experts from China and Israel, is quite popular primarily in its eastern homeland. Its history began in 2003, with the creation of an add-on for Internet Explorer called MyIE. The Beijing programmer Jeff Chen was engaged in it. The popularity of the browser was based primarily on the stability of work and many additional features that were not available in older versions of IE (in particular, in MyIE and subsequently in Maxthon, you could use tabs, ad blocking, easily manage proxies, work with many search engines and etc.).

    At the moment, according to the statistics of the developers, about 80 million users have downloaded the browser, half of them from China.

    As a result of the deal between Maxthon International Limited and Google, a lot can change, but observers agree that, first of all, “default” search engines will change: at the moment, in the Chinese version, of course, Baidu is used , in the rest - Yahoo . For Google , which is struggling to - but still gaining a share in the Chinese market, “seizing” the position of the main search engine in one of the country's most popular browsers is very important.

    Money Maxthon does not hurt: the company is actively working on the final release of the second version of the browser (it is already available for beta testing). Although investors have already taken part in financing the development: for 2005-2006, the company managed to get about $ 6-7 million.

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