Google + Maxthon = $ 1 million?

Michael Arrington, a leading Techcrunch blog, known for his promptness in spreading plausible rumors, today publishes a new message from "about Googl 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 story began in 2003 - with the creation of an add-on over Internet Explorer, called MyIE. She was engaged in her Beijing programmer Jeff Chen (Jeff Chen). Browser popularity was based primarily on work stability 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, easy to manage proxy, work with many search engines and etc.).

At the moment, according to the statistics of the developers, the browser downloaded about 80 million users, half of them from China.
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As a result, the deal between Maxthon International Limited and Google may change a lot, but observers agree that the default search engines will change: at the moment, the Chinese version uses, of course, Baidu , the rest of them use Yahoo . For Google , which is struggling — but still winning a share in the Chinese market, “capturing” the position of the main search engine in one of the most popular browsers in the country is very important.

Maxthon money 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 participated in the financing of development: for 2005-2006, the company managed to get about $ 6-7 million.