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Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

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Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#51

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.

> watch a YouTube video while reading Hacker News.

The YouTube app also does that (although possibly only if you have YouTube Red?)

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#52
post #50

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.

Good thing about this is that those users are poor so most developers are free to ignore them.

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#53
post #45

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?

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 ne…

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

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#54

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

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…

>The UC Browser app takes up 31 megabytes of space, compared with Chrome’s 125 megabytes

Given that bundling Chrome is a requirement if you want to ship a mobile phone with the Play Store, this is a moot point

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#55

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.

Firefox does the same thing

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#56
post #15

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...

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.

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#57

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?

I have a 2015 moto g with lineageOS Nougat and don't see any issues with chrome or firefox (I use firefox on android as my default)

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#58
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.

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

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

Interesting.

I've found in terms of speed: Opera > Firefox > Chrome. I suspect it is due primarily to ads.

Re: Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Brave—runs 3-6x faster on Android than Chrome due to blocking ads and fingerprinting: https://brave.com/

I use Opera as my main browser on IOS desktop, along with Brave. Brave is my main android browser

What are the pros and cons of Brave compared to Opera on mobile?
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