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

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.