Why are domestic browsers not welcomed?

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Chen Gen

The global desktop browser market is almost the "world" of Western companies.

According to the global desktop browser market survey report released by the analysis agency StatCounter, the browsers most used by users in the world are Google Chrome, Safari, Edge Browser, Firefox and Opera Browser, of which Google Chrome leads the global desktop browser market with a market share of 65.38%, and is a well-deserved browser overlord.

That is to say, none of the top five browsers in the world is a browser developed by Chinese companies. But the fact is that there are not a few browsers developed by related enterprises in the mainland, such as the mainstream Sogou browser, 360 speed browser, QQ browser and cheetah browser.

Compared with the popularity of Google Chrome, Safari, Edge Browser, etc., why have domestic browsers been snubbed? If you want to regain the browser market, what else do domestic browsers need?

Browsers are a thing of the past

The advent of the browser pushed the computer from the software age to the web age. Its main function is to make a request to the server and display HTML documents, pictures, videos and other network content in the browser window.

The world's first browser, the famous WorldWideWeb, was born in 1990. At the time, the Web was just a computer program whose purpose was to display and retrieve data. Use the URL assigned to each web page stored on the web server. That is, when people type something in a browser, they are actually entering an address that the browser will use to get the information that people want to see.

After the World Wide Web, there were early browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was "the first widely used web browser in the history of the Internet to display images," and while Mosaic was still the most popular browser, Marc Andreesen and colleague Jim Clark successfully launched the Netscape browser.

Thanks to features such as JavaScript and "partial-screen loading" (users can start reading the details on the page even if the page isn't fully loaded), Netscape quickly became the market leader, accounting for half of the browser market, and at its craziest, Netscape's market share was close to ninety percent.

Netscape's success proved to those who worked in the computer and Internet fields the inevitable trend of the web age, leading many in the industry to speculate that "the era of operating systems is over." Against this backdrop, Microsoft successfully seized the opportunity to create its own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), in the late 1990s.

Microsoft through a large investment in its products, and with the status of its operating system, the IE free and with Windows bundled, with the price increase as a coercion to require the host manufacturer to display the icon of IE on the desktop, and not to join Netscape, so that Internet Explorer can occupy a place in the market and continue to grow and develop, and finally won in the browser field, which is the famous "first browser war".

The rapid decline in market share led to the sale of Netscape to AOL, and in July 2003, Netscape was dissolved. On the day of dissolution, the Mozilla Foundation was founded, and in 2004, Firefox based on Mozilla's source code debuted, followed by Opera and Safari, which kicked off the second browser war. At that time, the worm was spreading rapidly on the network with IE.

Firefox is effective in preventing the spread of viruses and has won users with personalization, multimedia and open innovation. Safari maintains Apple's characteristic paranoia, beautiful interface, and takes advantage of the iPhone's dominance of the mobile browser market. As a result, Firefox, Safani and other browsers grasp the problem of IE, provide users with quality services with personalization and openness, and gradually win users and occupy a part of the market.

The emergence of Chrome means the opening of the third Internet browser war. In 2008, Google launched its proprietary browser, Chrome. By the end of 2012, just four years after its launch, Google Chrome had replaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser with its ease of use, cross-platform features, speed, and special features related to tags and bookmarks.

In this process, domestic browsers have also opened the way for development, but due to the late start, there is already a certain gap with competitors of Western companies in terms of technology or environmental platform. Moreover, throughout the development of the browser, the user experience has been paid more and more attention to when the user interacts with the browser, which is exactly what the domestic browser lacks.

Why are domestic browsers snubbed?

Chrome can be said to be the only browser market in the current browser market, followed by Safari, Edge, Firefox and Opera. Although there are not a few browsers developed by related enterprises in the mainland, they are relatively left out and are in an awkward market position.

The reason why domestic browsers are not recognized, or to be precise, the recognition is low, the core reason is that there is a gap in the technical level, and there are problems in the business model, which is superimposed on these two levels, which leads to the impact of the user's experience and feelings, which is difficult to be accepted by the user.

From a technical point of view, the current mainstream browsers in China use the Chromium kernel version of Chrome with shells, and there is no independent kernel. In 2018, Redcore Browser, which is an independent and innovative domestic browser, announced the completion of 250 million yuan in financing, which became a hit. But then, the Redcore browser, which claimed to be the "first independent innovation browser kernel", was pulled out to use the open source code of the Chrome 49 kernel 2 years ago, and the counterfeiting became the label of the Redcore browser, and the Redcore became the object of contempt.

You know, the kernel is the most technical part of the browser, and its core role is to present the web content correctly in front of our eyes. At present, the world's most mainstream browser kernels are Webkit, Trident and Gecko.

Among them, Webkit is Apple's kernel, Safari browser uses it, and Chrome browser originally used it, and then based on it launched the Blink kernel, will also be called Chrome kernel. Trident is a kernel modified by Microsoft on the basis of Mosaic code for Internet Explorer, and currently, Trident has added support for modern browser technology and introduced the EdgeHTML kernel for use in edge browsers. Gecko's code is completely public, mainly used by the Firefox browser.

The development of independent innovation of the browser kernel, the development cycle is long, the technical threshold is high, time-consuming, labor-intensive and costly, and because of this, domestic browsers have not been able to practice the independent kernel. Today's domestic browsers, to a large extent similar to Xiaomi's MIUI system, only on the basis of open system code such as Google for secondary development, similar to today's android-based secondary development systems.

Not only that, on the basis of the domestic browser without the blessing of its own core algorithm, it further over-commercializes traffic and users, which will inevitably make the user's sense of experience drop significantly. After all, with the development of the mobile Internet and the continuous improvement of the smartphone ecology, the competition of the entire domestic Internet has entered the competition between platforms and ecosystems from websites, products and services, etc.

As a comprehensive platform, the browser includes various functions such as search, internal distribution, information content and scanning, so the competition behind the browser can also be seen as the competition between Internet companies. Under such competition, domestic browsers began to focus their "research" on "how to become the default browser". Driven by interests, the "rogue behavior" of domestic browsers has also begun to emerge in an endless stream. Desktop pop-ups, homepage ads, adding boot starts, modifying the default browser, tampering with the browser homepage, bundling the family bucket, and so on.

Not only that, domestic manufacturers have also created a traffic entrance to the browser, made an information aggregation platform, and fully integrated the traffic in the domain into the browser. For example, the Sogou browser is implanted with too many things that do not belong to the browser itself, novels, information, games, etc., 360 browser, QQ browser is the same, the manufacturers behind these browsers want to frame the traffic in their own domain through the browser.

Moreover, domestic browsers do not provide a very friendly third-party open platform, unlike Chrome browsers, which have a rich plug-in system. You know, some people even fall in love with the Chrome browser specifically because of a variety of easy-to-use plug-ins, including Flash ad blocking, web page screenshots full screen, image collection, youtube video download can all be implemented in the Chrome browser, and do not need third-party exe programs to install.

In this way, the development of domestic browsers has deviated more and more from the original intention of the browser, blindly allowing users to digest their own products and ecology, desperately stuffing the information and content of cooperative websites, and users are naturally gradually leaving.

The future of domestic browsers

Domestic browsers want to regain the market of browsers, and technology and business models are the focus.

In fact, Google, Apple and other browsers are recognized by users, mainly because of their technology and design, Google, Apple and other browsers in the functional, aesthetic, interactive and other aspects of the work, so that users in the use of browsers are physiologically and psychologically satisfied, even pleasant, they are based on the user's psychology and use needs of the study, to the user experience as the core of the development.

It is worth mentioning that browsers such as Google and Apple do not rely on the browser itself to achieve commercial purposes, but are based on the user behavior big data obtained behind the browser, based on the user's behavior big data, and accurately deliver relevant advertisements and applications. This accurate delivery is not based on the browser itself, but a series of applications, mailboxes, other dependent websites, etc. derived from the browser, and accurate advertising is delivered to users through these related derivative platforms.

On the one hand, this increases the effectiveness and accuracy of the customer's advertising, on the other hand, it reduces the user's sense of exclusion, and the delivery of these advertisements is also the information that the user wants to know.

It can be said that for Google and Apple, the browser is only an entry point for collecting user behavior big data, not the core of their monetization, and their real core is based on the user behavior big data obtained by the browser, and monetizes through these big data.

This is the core difference between browsers such as Google and Apple and our domestic browsers. And our domestic browser is simply based on the browser itself to achieve commercial monetization, resulting in excessive advertising, and in the absence of accurate big data analysis, to push a variety of low-quality advertisements to users, which will lead to user disgust, but also to the user's use of trouble.

Logically, we have a huge user base, and this order of magnitude distillation of innovation is enough to affect browser standards. Our domestic browser should seize more discourse power in the industry standard, and then serve users, and even serve the domestic operating system that may be in the future.

But this premise is that our domestic browser can "treat" its own users. There's no problem with making money with the browser, but we users shouldn't be seen as KPIs, money-making tools, lambs to be slaughtered. In the final analysis, if domestic browsers want to get ahead, the most important thing to do is to return the purpose of developing browsers to the product use itself, and build the browser into a real search tool, rather than a spam aggregation center.

After all, if browsers are so unfriendly to users, then users will not actively choose such browsers.