After the very positive reaction to Part 1, today we continue our Developer Interview Series with a chat with the developers behind the skinnable web browser, Maxthon.  A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sit down with Jeff Chen, founder of Maxthon and SiC, the main UI & Experience Designer and tossed out some questions about Maxthon, how it came to be, why they did what they did and where they feel the application is headed in the future. 

Also to remind folks, we are currently running a Maxthon 2.0 Skinning Contest here at WinCustomize where the prizes are a digital camera, an iPod, and a Wacom Digital Tablet.  If you're a Maxthon skinner, or interested in winning some nice loot, hit the link above for details.  Deadline currently is the end of the month for submissions so get cracking!

As always, if you are, or know someone who is a developer for a skinnable application or skinning utility, and are interested in getting involved in our ongoing Developer Interview Series, send an email to mikec AT stardock DOT com with the subject "Developer Interview Series"  I'm always on the lookout for great applications and developers to chat with!

Note: This interview was conducted before the release of Maxthon 2.0, so some questions ask about the "impending release".  Also, please note that English is not Jeff or SiC's native language.

1.Please introduce yourselves.  Who are you?  What do you do on the project?

[Jeff] This is Jeff Chen, the founder of Maxthon. From day one, I am the main developer of Maxthon. If you find any bugs in Maxthon, it's probably my fault . Now I also take care of the Maxthon Company, make sure everyone here is happy and well organized.

[SiC] I'm the User Interface & Experience Designer, SiC.   I am responsible for the User Interface and some minor parts of the software, such as the Default Skin, Magic Fill, Float Ads Filter, Browser History Page and the Setup Center etc.

2. Could you provide a little bit of history behind Maxthon?  How did it start?  Why a mod of IE?

[Jeff] Maxthon is started from 2003. It's called MyIE2 at that time, when I was at Singapore. The life at Singapore is comfortable, well, a bit boring. And I felt I have nothing to do at night, so I spent most of my time on internet. The more I use internet, the more I feel uncomfortable with the browser. I often need some features that current browser does not have. Since I am a software developer, my developer brain told me to write the feature I need myself. That's how Maxthon (MyIE2) started. The reason of choosing based on IE render engine is simple, I am familiar with IE development and building a totally new render engine will cost too much time.

[SiC] In the very beginning, Maxthon is named MyIE2, which is a descendant of the MyIE created by Changyou.   I was in college then. And I found this little program while browsing the website with no purpose, and then made it my default browser.   After visiting its website, I think I could do a better website for it. And then, I was in. And then, others were in.   MyIE2 was just a hobby project to us all at first. He was in Singapore. I and others were in China. We were separated in different places, but the internet connected us.   After changing the name MyIE2 to Maxthon in July 2004, Jeff (aka. bloodchen) decided to establish a company at the March 2005.

3. In general, skinnable browsers are pretty rare.  Firefox is perhaps the most well-known browser that supports custom themes.  Why did Maxthon go the route of being individually skinnable instead of relying on tools that customize the entire Windows interface?

[Jeff]  First, our users like to see Maxthon will beautiful skins. And we found that customizing the entire windows sometimes cost too much resources. A lot of users do have that tool installed and they want a better looking browser. Then we have no choice but developing our own skin system.

[SiC] We always care about user experience. And the interface is one of the most important part of user experience. This is why we had the skinning feature.   Those customize tools can only change the common part of program interface, and the result is not always good enough.   When we found there is a need to implement the ability to change icons to make the whole browser interface capable with customize interface, I said "Why not implement a full skinning system to let our users have more choices?" "It's hard to implement those skinning ability with current program infrastructure." Jeff responded.   So, we wait, till the whole re-coded Maxthon 2.0 is in our schedule.

4. A lot of the technology in Maxthon has since shown up in the major browsers; Tabs, built-in popup blocking, mouse gestures, automatic updates etc.  How are you keeping ahead of the competition?  What new features are you pushing that no one else has?

[Jeff] We are happy to see some of our features are adapted by major browsers. But there are still a lot that most browsers do not have, to name a few: advanced content filtering system, advanced proxy system, URL key, URL alias, search alias, smart acceleration system... And we believe what we are developing will keep Maxthon ahead. The new feature will include a light security system to help reduce attacks from Trojan, a new web acceleration technology and more...

[SiC] Feature set is just one aspect of user experience. The exposure of features to users and feature accessibility is another aspect of it.   Also, we will continue to provide more innovation ideas to keep our position of this challenge.   What's next? Whatever that makes our users feel better.

5. You’ve gained a lot of popularity in China, which is a vast but generally underserved corner of the IT market.  What are you doing to gain more attention and grow your user base in the rest of the world?

[SiC] Well, I'd better leave this question to Jeff. He knows business more than I.

[Jeff] Yes. We have a lot of Chinese users. Actually we also have a lot of users in other countries, such as US, Russia, France ... we have covered over 200 countries. The reason that Maxthon is not as famous as Firefox or Opera is that most Maxthon users just use it but not talk about it. And we are actually quite low profiled company. (We just have a PR department last month). We don't want to involve in so called 'browser wars', instead, we just want to make users have a better web browser experience.

6. Explain briefly how you implemented skinning in your browser.  According to Wikipedia, you use a mixture of Trident (IE) and Gecko (Firefox).  How did you go about mixing the two together?  What were the major technical hurdles?

[Jeff]  I won't go into details of how we program the skin system. Basically we created our own toolbar, button, frame control that could support our skin system. For Trident and Gecko, we support them in our classic version and will add the support to our 2.x version soon. We used a COM control that wrap around gecko to make it compatible with Trident. The major technical hurdle is that Gecko does not support all Trident interface and we have to either re-implement the missing interface or disable it.

[SiC] We use an interface framework developed in C++. Using native compiled library has a great performance opportunity over cross-platform frameworks like XUL used by Firefox. Since our software requires the Trident engine of IE, and Windows is the most popular operation system, cross-platform support is not a high priority task to us.

About mixing Trident and Gecko together, there really are a lot of things to have done. The biggest trouble is that the two engine uses different technology to communicate with programs. We might have a hard time on wrapping Gecko engine into a control if we.

7.  I’ve read in the news how you’ve received significant venture capital funding from people like Skype co-founder Morten Lund, as well as a few other investment groups.  How has that helped/hurt expansion and development?

[SiC] Another question should be left to Jeff.

[Jeff] It helps us to get more people involved in Maxthon. We have more resources to do some development and marketing. Generally it does not hurt anything because we never give up our development for funding.

8. You have some very vocal supporters such as recognized tech pundit Chris Pirillo.  How connected are you with your most evangelical community members?  Do they influence development decisions?

[Jeff] Yes, Chris is one of our best friends. I have people like him in my msn list. We are very closed connected with our community. We communicate through our forum, msn, gtalk, anything you can image. To us, making our users happy is a main reason that we keep developing Maxthon. I'd say Maxthon is influenced by our community very much.

[SiC]We do thank our users and supporters. We don't expect go this far in the beginning. But they have pushed us here.  Our community really affects our development and design decisions.  Especially, we should thank the testing team in our Chinese forum. They had found out a bunch of bugs for us to fix before every release.

9.  2.0 is nearing release, with RC3 released last month.  I’m sure you’re already starting to think about what you’d like to include in your next version.  What are a few of your dream features for 3.0?

[Jeff] Like I said in question 4, we would put more resource on making our browser more secure and making it faster. We don't have any feature set for 3.0 yet.

[SiC] We haven't got a schedule for 3.0 yet. The 2.0 version is still not completed and its release is just the beginning of the 2.0 series.

What I would dream of in 3.0? A platform for all internet experiences? Might be.

10.  You’ve grown a strong community around the browser, and they’ve turned out some excellent skins and plugins.  What are a few of your favorite user-created bits for Maxthon?

[Jeff] I personally like plugins like 'more options', 'viewpage'. They helped me in development.

[SiC] As a web developer, I like the PowerBand plugin by AWater, though it can not run with 2.0 yet. It's something like IE Developer Toolbar, but much earlier, and had helped my work for 2 years.

As a designer, I would to recommend the SoCool skin by iconsbox and the HuaJing ("Painting Realm" in Chinese) skin by NanShanCaoLu ("Hut of Southern Hill" in Chinese).

The latter skin mixed traditional Chinese painting and modern UI elements.

• PowerBand
• SoCool Skin
• HuaJing Skin

11. Any parting comments or thoughts you’d like to share with WinCustomize/the skinning community?

[Jeff] I want to say 'hello' and 'thanks' to WinCustomize/skinning community. It's their desire that makes us developing an advanced skin system. I also want to thank to all skin authors who have created Maxthon skins. Your excellent work makes a lot of people happy. And I also want to welcome more skin authors to create Maxthon skins and related stuff. Let's grow with Maxthon together and making our browsing experience better.

[SiC] I hope there will be more great skins from the WinCustomize community.  And your feedback of our skin system could help us make it more flexible and beautiful.

The screenshots in this article are previews of Maxthon browser skins.  In order they are:

1. The default Maxthon skin
2. HuaJing, Winner of the Most Creative Skin in the Chinese Maxthon Skinning Competition
3. SoCool, Winner of the Most Usable Skin in the Chinese Maxthon Skinning Competition
4. Vreaming, Winner of the Most Popular Skin in the Chinese Maxthon Skinning Competition