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Google has just acquired a minority stake of upto $1 million in Maxthon, a Chinese web browser. This investment is rumored to be part of a “much larger strategic deal” between the two companies.

Maxthon is a really slick tabbed, fully customizable and totally free web browser built on top of Microsoft´s Internet Explorer platform. The browser also supports mouse gestures, Drag and Drop, Ad hunter, Popup blocker, Proxy based browsing, RSS feed support, Customizable skins, and is really memory efficient. I am a regular user of both Firefox and Maxthon and have experiece firefox getting bogged down if you open 8-10 tabs for a while, whereas Maxthon continuously free memory making it to perform at optimal. Full Maxthon feature list is here.

Maxthon has had over 80 million downloads, half of which are in Mainland China. Maxthon originated searches account for around 25% of Baidu´s traffic. Unlike Firefox, Maxthon has a global footprint with bulk of its users in China and Europe. The default Maxthon search option sends searches to Baidu in China and Yahoo in other countries. Google will surely want it to be replaced with Google Search, which is certainly the most powerful way to acquire traffic.

The deal is significant for both Maxthon and Google. Google would gain a huge footprint in China and rest of the world instantly by becoming a default search option in Maxthon. Maxthon will gain scores of new users with Google promoting it as a preferred browser on its sites. Further more it will definitely be getting a share of revenue from searches that will originate from its search box, just like Firefox does. Most of Firefox´s multi million dollar revenue is generated because of its deal with Google, in which Google shares revenues with Firefox for all searches that originate from Firefox.

Maxthon has raised around $6 million to date. Morten Lund and WI Harper were the angel investors in March 2005, they are the same guys who were behind Skype. CRV invested around $5 million in March 2006. Maxthon most likely will not have to raise another round after this deal.

Read: Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb

Mozilla labs has released some details about project Coop, an attempt to transform the browser into a social network. The product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser along with avatar representation, display them in the sidebar, share and send content and webpages.

Adding friends will also enable you to share and view a wide range of web´s exciting content with friends including Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace profile, Youtube Favorites and what not. Sharing content is a breeze, all you need to do is drag it from the webpage and drop it on the avatar of the person.

The release of Coop will be a killer blow to Flock, a privately backed social browser that is being built on top of Mozilla code base. Flock aims to do exactly what Mozilla has just announced, in fact their is such an overlap of features that the Mozilla team decided to put the snapshot of Flock in their wiki page as an example. Above all it teaches us that building upon others technology is just like building castles on sand. We have now seen this numerous times, first Alexa shutting doors to Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to build an in house version of Flock.

Another impact of the browser would be on the social networks that rely on the generation of massive page views by users while they are browsing each others profiles. The status information on your friends in the browser sidebar will remove the need to view the profiles on the social networks itself.

Mozilla is now really turning out to be a competitive force, they now have many exciting projects including

• Project Minimo: a mobile web browser
• Project Joey: a server, firefox add on and java midlet that lets you pass data from Firefox to your mobile phone.
• Project Operator, an effort to combine pieces of information on website applications meaningfully for example Upcoming + Google Calendar, Yahoo Local + Your address book.

A good 2 decades ago Apple Computers unveiled the Apple Macintosh a personal computer that was a revolutionary innovation in terms of User Interface and Usability. Microsoft responded to it not by creating its own PC but just by developing (they actually got it from somewhere) an Operating System, Windows. What happened next is history and is taught in the CS curriculum around the world.

Fast forward 2 decades, Apple launches iPhone a phone that is atleast a decade ahead of its time when it comes to usability and interface design. Microsoft is targeting it once again, not with a phone of its own but once again a piece of software, DeepFish.

Deepfish is a mobile browser that preserves the layout of documents on the small screen and makes Web Navigation easier, enabling users to zoom in and out of a page, downloading only the pages users are interested in. The browser uploads a thumbnail of pages initially and keeps navigation menus, search results, news headlines etc in tact.

The question is “Can Microsoft do it yet again ?“. The answer is plain and simple NO, and here are the top 5 reasons why 2007 is not like 1984.

1. Microsoft Itself: Microsoft is no longer the underdog that no one knows about. After spending 2 decades in the industry every kid in town knows about the anti competitive, innovation grabber machine called Microsoft fair well.

2. IBM does not make mobile phones: IBM does not make mobile phones, on which the browser could be pre installed like the windows was done on IBM PC’s 2 decades ago. So In order for the browser to gain market share Microsoft will need to have partnerships with Nokia, Samsung and other mobile manufacturers. Keeping in view Microsoft´s reputation this ain’t gonna happen this time.

3. iPod: This reason might sound funny to some, but this time its Apple itself in the boots of IBM. Apple now enjoys the same status in the mobile portable music world which IBM enjoyed in the PC world. The tremendous success of iPod has build Apple´s brand and has made it a household name, far beyond the geek only world.

4. Blogosphere: Apple generated millions worth of PR without spending a dime on the launch of iPhone and not only this it single handedly eclipsed the entire electronics world gathered at CES for Tech Glitz and Buzz. This is made possible because of a new form of publishing called blogging, a place where Apple enjoy huge and loyal following.

Compare this to the billions Microsoft is spending on Vista marketing and PR and yet i don’t even know how many editions it has, or how is live mail and live messenger different from hotmail and msn messenger.

5. Open Source: As if all the above were not enough, we now have competition in the form of Open source Mozilla project, Minimo. Minimo boasts faster access, support for modern web standards like Javascript and AJAX, social bookmarking, tag browsing and RSS support (much of which Deepfish lacks).

It is “Enhanced Browsing for your Mobile Device” vs “Enhanced Mobile Device” scenario. So to me Deepfish is clearly in Deepshit!!!!