
Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones - olivermarks
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-browser-youve-never-heard-of-is-dethroning-google-in-asia-1514808002
======
0xmohit
There have been reports talking about security issues in UC Browser [0] for a
while [1] now [2].

It was also removed from Google Play Store [3] (although temporarily).

Kinda surprises me to see it as the 'dominant' browser. Maybe people are
indifferent.

[0] [https://citizenlab.ca/2015/05/a-chatty-squirrel-privacy-
and-...](https://citizenlab.ca/2015/05/a-chatty-squirrel-privacy-and-security-
issues-with-uc-browser/)

[1] [https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/a-tough-nut-to-crack-look-
priv...](https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/a-tough-nut-to-crack-look-privacy-and-
security-issues-with-uc-browser/)

[2] [https://tech.blorge.com/2017/11/27/uc-browser-believed-
colle...](https://tech.blorge.com/2017/11/27/uc-browser-believed-collect-
private-information-users/164069)

[3] [http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/uc-browser-app-
vanishes-f...](http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/uc-browser-app-vanishes-
from-play-store-following-privacy-concerns/story-lEaTNqp9KMEEDlkqV34dnN.html)

~~~
CydeWeys
Very true. Amongst many other security flaws, UC Browser also does not support
HSTS (headers or preload list) at _all_. That means that a connection made by
UC Browser to any site can be man-in-the-middled and inspected or modified.

As far as the Chinese government is concerned, however, this may be a feature
rather than a bug.

No one should be using UC Browser, full stop. It's pathologically insecure.

~~~
gatmne
But it correctly supports HTTPS right? If so, then a MITM attack shouldn't be
possible unless your system trusts a bad CA.

~~~
sanxiyn
sslstrip exists. HTTPS support doesn't matter if you don't get HTTPS.

~~~
willstrafach
sslstrip does not stop HTTPS connections. It simply replaces https links on a
page with http, and that itself requires the initially manipulated page to be
served over plain HTTP.

It was far more relevant when websites were mostly HTTP, but used HTTPS for
login or payment pages.

~~~
CydeWeys
It doesn't _stop_ HTTPS connections, but if I type in randomdomain.com in my
browser and hit return, that sends an HTTP request by default. If someone is
intercepting my connection, they can modify what's being returned by the
webserver, and even if the server itself only serves via HTTPS, the man-in-
the-middle program can simply terminate HTTPS and then serve a modified
version of the now-unencrypted contents via HTTP.

The only way to get guaranteed security is if your browser will only ever make
HTTPS connections to a given domain name, and that requires HSTS preloading.

------
gketuma
UC Browser is now holding the web back by not adopting new standards like css-
grid and flexbox. No version of UC supports these standards and with the rise
of UC globally, developers are hesitant to use these standards as millions of
users especially in India and China are left out. I know there are ways to
configure fallback, but still.

~~~
EKLM-ZK88
Why do these markets use these browsers and not chrome or firefox, or even the
built in browsers on their phones?

~~~
taobility
The question is like why those users do not use iPhone or Samsung Galaxy 7

~~~
saagarjha
You’re being disingenuous: people don’t use iPhones or Galaxies because
they’re expensive. Browsers are free and it doesn’t cost money to change them.

~~~
cwyers
And the people who author mobile Chrome all use iPhones or Galaxies or Pixels.
It's about the dogfooding -- the people who write UC Browser use it on the
same phones, mobile networks and websites that the users of UC Browser use, so
it's written with their needs in mind.

~~~
EKLM-ZK88
I guess that's what i dont understand, what are the needs of the people in
this market and what about chrome or firefox fails to meet that need? It
doesn't have flexbox support, and i would imagine that would break a ton of
modern websites. It isn't like these markets have their own version of
html/css, everyone's on the same web, so why go for a browser with worse
support for modern standards?

~~~
lurenjia
Users don't know/care about flexbox at all. It's developers concern.

Also UC has much more features and builtin contents than chrome. Maybe UC can
provide better user experience to new internet users that think typing urls on
phones to see news and videos weird. Not everyone likes minimalism.

~~~
addicted
Your last sentence is very important.

At least Chinese markets (and possibly Indian and others as well)do not seem
to have the disdain for feature loading American markets do.

Weibo is one of the most popular apps in the markwt (if not most) and it’s
practically an operating system of its own. I suspect it would have gotten
nowhere in US markets because people would have complained about it being not
focused and having a bad UI.

------
enitihas
A very large reason for the huge user base of UC browser is that it used to
work on very low end phones, like Nokia S40 editions, similar to Opera Mini,
and many people who migrated from those kept using UC.

Also, these browsers operated with very less data using server side
comprssion. Not good for privacy maybe, but good for slow connections.

Another thing I hear from people using UC is that it has really good download
capabilities. Such functionality might be common in today's mobile browsers,
but 4 years ago, it was difficult to find another browser which could pause
and resume downloads, which is essential if you have a slow internet
connection.

A lot of people using UC were using Opera Mini. However, UC has a much larger
bigger marketing budget and that I think made the difference.

------
est
From a native speaker's perspective, yes UCWeb browser is a piece of
technological crap.

It broke so many things, violates so many standards, MITM traffic and unsafe.

But for some group of people, it does one thing the only thing right: text
reflow

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079345)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9461597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9461597)

You guys can imaging how crappy Chinese websites are, full of unrelated ads
and mis-information. UCWeb has some kind of manual defined rules as well as
automatic converter (IIRC, based on LXML and Squid) to strip html content and
leave only minimal style and mostly text content. It was vast popular during
2G GPRS WAP era, and just as popular in 3G/4G era. E.g. something similar to
youtube-dl+basic player for well known video sites.

UCWeb has this server-side as well as client-side page clean process that
allows you to view content in some kind of Reader mode. People don't use UCWeb
for your fancy HTML5 "full" experience but rather for a "casual online
reading", e.g. for fake & hype news sites, Internet fan novels, online
shitposting boards, etc.

For serious matters like social networking (very serious!), ppl use apps, for
business/work related, or personal banking, people just switch to iOS/Android
default browser for security. For everything else, well it's a totally
different landscape in Asia, there's Wechat, one mega app for everything.

I have never seen anyone use UCWeb exclusively, often the have a standby
fallback option.

UCWeb is growing out of a niche market and is growing well. If you think UCWeb
is the same kind of browser like Chrome or Safari you are thinking it wrong.

~~~
pmontra
The first comment you linked is mine. I only read some western languages, no
Chinese. I'm both happy somebody else (you) cares about the issue and sad that
not enough people do.

I'm using Firefox on my phone now because of the addons: uBlock origin
(especially to hide fixed top and bottom bars, I also use Blokada to block ads
even in app, no root required), Nocoin, Disable WebRTC, BarbBlock.

Some sites are really a pain to read because of horizontal scrolling. Reader
mode helps sometimes but it doesn't when the site or the css are really
broken. An example: reader mode doesn't work on Mozilla's own bug tracker.
Kind of meta bug.

Example at
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784653](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784653)

------
fny
UC Browser apparently has more mobile usage that Firefox in the US. In 2017,
they've clocked in at 1.22% vs Firefox's 0.59%.

Years ago, (~2004) I used to use a desktop version years to get around
firewalls at my high school. Nowadays I wonder how the Chinese government uses
the traffic data to take the temperature of the US.

[0]: [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share/mobile/united...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share/mobile/united-states-of-america)

~~~
fencepost
That's really sad, because Firefox on Android is actually really great and the
fact that you can run addons (e.g. uBlock Origin) makes it even better.

In years past Firefox would occasionally crash on me, but I'm not sure it's
ever even done that on my current phone, which is closing in on 9 months old.
I'm not exactly treating it kindly either, I currently have 93 "tabs" open and
though it doesn't keep those in memory it does recall page position even if it
has to reload the original source when I go back (based on it putting me at
the same point on the page for a week-old HN thread I was skimming through).

There are some addons I'd recommend bypassing on mobile though just for UI
reasons - uMatrix, any of the Vim keybinding options, stuff like that. Also,
unfortunately the Invert Colors addon doesn't work on Android because of a
missing API.

~~~
metilda
Dark background, light text for Firefox Android is pretty good, makes reading
websites much easier for me!

------
AndrewWarner
If you’re in iOS, UC is a great way to pop out videos so you can, for example,
watch a YouTube video while reading Hacker News.

It also enables you to listen to just about any video in the background, when
you switch to other apps.

~~~
thisacctforreal
Sounds handy! Can anyone speak to how it treats privacy?

~~~
snaky
Privacy? On low-end smartphones with some trojan factory preinstalled?

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/03/prein...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/03/preinstalled-malware-targets-android-users-of-two-
companies/)

------
fencepost
Not necessarily worth much these days, but in the early days of Windows 10 on
phones when Edge had... issues, UC Browser was one of the only other options
available. While MS has technically (mostly?) abandoned Windows Phone, it does
still get updates including regular Insider builds and Edge is much better
these days.

I'm a little disappointed but perhaps not surprised to see Dolphin Browser
missing - before Firefox and Chrome really got there on Android it was a great
option including tabbed browsing, plugins including adblocking, and even
"Dolphin Jetpack" which was their own updated Webkit engine that Dolphin could
use instead of the built in and rarely-updated browser engine on 2.x and 4.x
phones.

~~~
pferde
Dolphin is still going strong. I've been happily using its "lite" version on
my old Android 2.2 phone until it (the phone, not the browser) completely
broke.

~~~
fencepost
Yeah, I have it installed but haven't actually used it for much of anything in
years. I suspect that part of the reason for its continued existence is the
hope that one or more carriers in China, India or elsewhere will pick it up
for an Android-based phone that doesn't include the Play store.

When there was a possibility that Microsoft was actually going to pull off
"Project Astoria" to let Android apps run in some way on Windows Phone, I was
actually hoping that Dolphin (with very limited dependency on the Play
ecosystem) would be one of the options and would become the de facto
alternative to Edge on WP. Google certainly wasn't going to go there and I
believe Mozilla had already expressed that they weren't planning on investing
much if anything in WP, so Dolphin would potentially have been the one solid
Webkit-based browser in the ecosystem.

------
Pharylon
Never heard of if you run an America-centric website. :) You have to support
UC and Qihoo 360 if you have a significant amount of Asia traffic.

------
gator-io
Netmarketshare.com has actual usage of UCBrowser (on mobile) last month at:
India: 4.54% China: 7.72% Indonesia: 6.76%

Not exactly domination.

~~~
est
market share of Netmarketshare.com in Asia is about 0.00%.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/jcmBJ](http://archive.is/jcmBJ)

------
cpcallen
I've been using UC Browser on my Nexus One for about a year. It has two killer
features:

\- It can be installed (unlike Chrome, which never ran on Gingerbread, and
Firefox, which I tried before but can now no longer reinstall).

\- It renders most pages correctly, unlike the AOSP browser.

It unfortunately does not solve the other major problem with the Gingerbread
ASOP browser: that I cannot connect to many modern SSL sites, so I keep Opera
Mini around for those. (Opera Mini is otherwise terrible.)

------
dangrover
The QQ Browser (QQ浏览器) is also pretty solid. I like its night mode better than
UC's, and you can archive pages for offline use. Tencent doesn't seem to be
trying to internationalize it as UC is, though.

------
mbchandar
Those who worry that UC browser is not sticking to standards... not thinking
about end users. End users or layman are using it because it is easy and lite.

------
puranjay
After a recent update, Chrome is nearly unusable on my spare 1 year old Moto
G4 phone. There is a massive lag when I try to type in text on any website.

Chrome's RAM hogging tendencies on desktop have also made me search for an
alternative for my PC. Sadly, Firefox is long way from its former glory. Any
suggestions?

~~~
Sylos
Have you actually tried Firefox? They've had a pretty big update recently,
which also broke many extensions and ways of making advanced extensions, so
some people do take that as reason to say that it's now "long way from its
former glory", but if you've been a Chrome user up until now, it'd strike me
as odd for you to think that, since it's still much more extensible than
Chrome.

Well, unless you haven't seen the new update yet and are talking of the
performance problems that it had prior to this update. In that case, you
should try the new version.

~~~
aceofspad3s
Firefox is much slower than Chrome on Android, at least on my (reasonably
powerful) Qualcomm 625

~~~
ams6110
I'm pretty happy with Firefox Focus on a Moto G3. Some people may not like the
lack of features in that browser however, e.g. no history, no cookies saved,
etc.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Some people may not like the lack of features in that browser however, e.g.
> no history, no cookies saved, etc.

That's kind of the point of Focus, it's meant to be a private browser. You can
also get regular Firefox with uBlock Origin to have a similar experience with
these features, if this annoys you.

------
known
I prefer Firefox@Home Chrome@Office and Opera@Mobile

------
kiwijamo
Is there a non-paywalled link?

~~~
applecrazy
It's only a simple Google search away.

But anyway, here you go:
[https://outline.com/Lx96qs](https://outline.com/Lx96qs)

Alternatively: [http://archive.is/jcmBJ](http://archive.is/jcmBJ)

------
aphextron
Hardly “dethroning” Google. UC is for low end feature phones that cannot run
any other browser.

~~~
greenbush
I don't think you read the article. :) The article specifically talks about
smartphones, not feature phones. It mentions how Chrome is an issue for
cheaper smartphones with less storage: "The UC Browser app takes up 31
megabytes of space, compared with Chrome’s 125 megabytes". And aside from a
smaller app size, UC also compresses data and blocks ads to reduce data
requirements (data tends to be expensive in emerging countries).

Let's face it, Chrome is designed by and for people living in the west, where
people have smartphones with lots of storage and typically buy monthly plans
with unlimited (or large allowance of) data.

~~~
vasilia
There is Chromium based Yandex Browser Lite which requires only 1mb of storage
size
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yandex.bro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yandex.browser.lite&hl=en)

~~~
gsnedders
I'd assume it's either a proxy browser and not doing much locally or just
using Android's WebView; even Opera/Presto towards its end couldn't fit in
such a small binary despite targetting tiny devices.

