How Qihoo 360 Won the Browser War in China

Regardless of the actual browser, Qihoo demonstrates absolute mastery of the Dark Pattern.

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.<p>Also it might be difficult for websites to know when Qihoo's browsers are being used, see two sample user agent strings below.<p>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; MAAU)<p>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11<p>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.<p>Here are the "About my browser" links:<p><a href="https://aboutmybrowser.com/3787375515" rel="nofollow">https://aboutmybrowser.com/3787375515</a> (Qihoo with Chrome core)<p><a href="https://aboutmybrowser.com/658681127" rel="nofollow">https://aboutmybrowser.com/658681127</a> (Chrome dev)<p>Seems Qihoo are one version behind the stable version released at the end of August.

Win the war in China? LOL<p>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.

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.

" 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. "<p>What society teaches people not to question authority? Which types of authority? There were nearly 100,000 peasant protests in China last year.<p>The default and innocuous -- at first glance -- nature of 360 is probably why it is doing so well.

So the browser <i>is</i> a virus. Who better to distribute this than the dominant antivirus platform.

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

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

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.