
How Qihoo 360 Won the Browser War in China - joshwa
http://www.digital-dd.com/qihoo-browser-war/
======
fredley
Regardless of the actual browser, Qihoo demonstrates absolute mastery of the
Dark Pattern.

~~~
ximeng
Agree with this, they have come from a fairly weak position to a point where
they have a significant chunk of the browser market and have even launched
their own search engine competing with Baidu, reportedly taking 10% market
share in a week(!)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/08/31/chinas-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/08/31/chinas-
qihoo-360-takes-aim-at-baidus-search-monopoly/)

------
ximeng
Their dual core browser - they have more than one browser - bakes in
functionality that some extensions provide to allow switching between Chromium
and Trident rendering engines. Arguably this pushes forward adoption of Webkit
in China, as it means that people can browse using Chromium much of the time
and switch back to "Compatibility mode" for many of the sites that are
designed for just IE.

Also it might be difficult for websites to know when Qihoo's browsers are
being used, see two sample user agent strings below.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; MAAU)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11

A couple of slightly inaccurate points in the article: I just installed and
uninstalled 360 safe browser - no option to revert to IE, so that point's not
correct. The icon is much like IE, but they have their own distinctive icon
for their dual core browser.

Here are the "About my browser" links:

<https://aboutmybrowser.com/3787375515> (Qihoo with Chrome core)

<https://aboutmybrowser.com/658681127> (Chrome dev)

Seems Qihoo are one version behind the stable version released at the end of
August.

------
isqlw
Win the war in China? LOL

In fact ,qihoo 360 a company which is good at writing rogue products, it main
product security guard 360 collects user's private data then transfer to their
server. before that ,it also become notorious for another rogue product
cooperate with cnnic.

------
dougunplugged
Author of this piece here. AMA. To start, no I wasn't paid by anyone to write
this, have no position in Qihoo, and have no affiliations with Citron, Muddy
Waters or Qihoo.

------
willxiansheng
" Society trains people not to question authority. Qihoo took advantage of
years of accumulated branding as an authority on security to exploit the
“suspension of suspiciousness” that arose when users were asked to install or
make default its browser. The company must continue to approach product
promotion from new angles to support its strong growth in advertising
revenues. "

What society teaches people not to question authority? Which types of
authority? There were nearly 100,000 peasant protests in China last year.

The default and innocuous -- at first glance -- nature of 360 is probably why
it is doing so well.

~~~
cynix
> What society teaches people not to question authority?

When your doctor tells you you have <insert disease name>, do you usually
question him?

~~~
CrazedGeek
Sometimes? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_opinion>

------
zzzeek
So the browser _is_ a virus. Who better to distribute this than the dominant
antivirus platform.

------
wheaties
Wow, wouldn't it be illegal to do, what they did elsewhere?

~~~
sbierwagen
The only thing in here that's outright actionable (in the united states) is
the trademark infringement on the IE logo. Everything else is merely
unethical, not illegal.

------
damian2000
Sounds like the sort of crapware that comes pre installed on new PCs.

------
seanmcdirmid
Don't upvote this, it sounds like a propaganda piece that is responding to the
Left/Citron short positions. I'm pretty sure Qihoo doesn't rule the browser
market in China (IE still does well), and their product is really just so so.

~~~
joshwa
Poster here-- I came across this as a link in a previous HN article [1] and
thought it would be interesting to folks here.

I live in China and it truly is a parallel universe when it comes to
computing. Local clones of everything, from iPhones to farmville. However to
own an actual Apple product is a huge status symbol (iPhones, but especially
iPads and Airs). The green "IE" logo is an attack vector that is completely
consistent with the ersatz nature of all computing in China.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498724>

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The Beijing tech scene is sort of small so we exchange a lot of war stories.
Qihoo is definitively buying some press and baking some numbers. The article
is not informative and seems paid for, hence why it shouldn't be up voted.

Beijing is its own bubble of course (more macs than other cities) but Im sure
IE has the lead in Chinese browser market share.

~~~
Semaphor
Paid for? What company would pay to be shown as someone bringing malware
(which this browser essentially is) to customers PCs?

