Google buys into Maxthon Browser

The browser itself has had 80 million downloads, but seeing as it offers nothing more than the latest versions of IE & Firefox, it could run out of steam soon, unless it offers some unique new enhancements...

Google have purchased a minority share in the company for approx $1 million, seemingly to enable it to become the default search engine, instead of Baidu or Yahoo. Most of the Maxthon users are in China.

They probably did some math like 50 million future users are worth spending 2 cents each on to be their default browser...