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

wsj.com

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

#111

Post by superkuh »

dictum wrote: post #76
gketuma wrote: 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.

As soon as I read the headline on the frontpage, I came here to search for a mention of flexbox. It's the only non-deprecated browser that only supports the first draft of the flexbox spec. There's no workaround for the lack of flex-wrap — you have to assume it's a small mobile device and arrange items on a single axis.

>you have to assume it's a small mobile device and arrange items on a single axis.

Is there really no other way to detect if it's desktop? It seems like screen aspect ratio would be easy.

Mobile sites look terrible on desktop browsers if they work at all. The one I encounter all the time is Firefox's add-on site. Just because I don't have css-grid it forces mobile which makes things worse. I know people like myself are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of users but we exist.

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

#113

Post by 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=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.

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

#114

Post by frik »

fencepost wrote: post #56
fny wrote: 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 memo…

Firefox feels very heavy and is slower than Chrome on Android, even on high end smartphone.

And it has a non-native UI that looks so out of place.

And many browser features like bookmark handling (folders) are still missing. Maybe v58 will change things for the better, but at the moment it's obvious why almost no one is using Firefox on mobile, probably even the devs don't dog food it on mobil. Where is the DevTools on mobile. Why not offer a full browser, with a slightly more mobile UI. Firefox mobile is very dumbed down, for casual users, Chrome has lots of more settings and features on mobile.

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

#115

Post by abhishek0318 »

EKLM-ZK88 wrote: post #63
gketuma wrote: 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.

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

Chrome and Firefox consume more memory. UC browser is faster. It can act as replacement of sports, news and Facebook app.

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

#117

Post by pferde »

fencepost wrote: post #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…

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.

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

#118

Post by pmontra »

est wrote: post #113

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=9461597 You guys can imaging how crappy Chinese websites are, full of unrelated ads and…

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

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

#119

Post by pmontra »

taobility wrote: post #80
EKLM-ZK88 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

One less zero in the price tag looks like a pretty good reason. The article is explicitly about low end phones.

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

#120

Post by fencepost »

pferde wrote: post #117
fencepost wrote: post #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…

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.

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.

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