Internet Explorer has had a lot of press in the past couple of years, some good, mostly bad. It has been blamed for a lack of updates and poor CSS support, and as a potential security risk.

However, most of this is exaggerated. The engine that drives the code in Internet Explorer is pretty good, it's the user interface that's lacking compared to modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

As the HTML web core is built in to Windows (or at least very hard to remove), there have been a number of attempts to create a replacement for Internet Explorer that takes the existing engine and gives it a brand new interface, with modern features such as tabbed windows, plug-in support, customisable skins and more.

Maxthon is one of the more popular Internet Explorer replacement browsers and is constantly updated.

It can open multiple tabbed web pages within one window, and uses limited system resources to browse the web. It supports mouse gestures and even enables you to browse news RSS feeds in the same window as you browse the web.

Note: although this is a replacement for Internet Explorer, it still requires Internet Explorer (v5 or higher) to be present on your system.