Once you’ve experienced multiple tabs and ad-blocking in Firefox, it’s tough to go back to Internet Explorer and its plethora of security troubles. But if you plan to continue using windowsupdate.com, you simply cannot exorcise Internet Explorer.

Enter Maxthon. Like Firefox, Maxthon gives you tabs and ad-blocking. Then it ups the ante with tab-saving and floating ad blocking. If you’re a regular web-user, you already know those annoying floating ads. Most blocking software can’t stop them. Maxthon can. But that tab-saving feature is even more essential.

When researching a subject area, you often open several windows (or tabs) concurrently. Maxthon simply lets you save your session, so you can get back to it later today, tomorrow, next week or next year.

These two features alone are worth the price which, by the way, is free. Maxthon has plenty of other interesting features, but they don’t matter to us. For better or worse, Microsoft links to the product, and it gets 5 stars from all the usual suspects.

If you can,,, or must… live with IE’s security issues, Maxthon’s worth a look.