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China’s first ‘fully homegrown’ web browser found to be Google Chrome clone
- dyukqu 8y agoUnrelated to the content, but it's kinda funny that they use .ist (TLD of Istanbul) for a Shanghai web site.
- huxflux 8y agoMakes sense since the name of the website is "Shanghaist". Shanghai + ist = shanghai.ist.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tcper 8y agoSuch frauds happened in China for many years, Chinese CPU, Chinese virtual machine, people in China cheats government for money for reputation all over there. Why they succeeded? Because all these frauds involved by officers in government.
- gritzko 8y agoSo what? Chrome was based on WebKit (Safari), Safari was based on KHTML (Konqueror).
- afsina 8y agoThis is not the same thing. What these guys doing is, for snatching some free money from government, they hid facts.
- mda 8y agoA browser is much more than the rendering engine, besides, blink today is a totally different beast, there is almost nothing left from khtml either.
- sdinsn 8y agoThe problem was that they sold it (to the government and to investors) as completely homegrown. Lying to investors is a crime.
- barkingcat 8y agoHow is this an issue? When Chrome started, it was based on webkit as well. They've since forked webkit but they did come from a clone of an existing engine.
- wyattpeak 8y agoThere's nothing wrong with forking a new browser off an existing one. There's plenty wrong with taking money on the promise that you're developing a browser from scratch, then doing the above.
- zepto 8y agoGoogle chrome ‘found to be’ Apple Safari... Apple Safari ‘found to be’ Konqueror...
- nailer 8y agoThis isn't a misunderstanding, but a deliberate lie by RedCore. RedCore actively and specifically stated they weren't based on Blink (Chrome's rendering engine, derived from WebKit, derived from KHTML). Here's an image from the announcement: https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/mmbiz_png/LB4LpUCAfNwtCCCtSYiaL9o2B7wyIxdqYy4ibBLZfaxicia9icf7yF84eN4H2IallW1v5EibR70nUicNX9BR2Uv0y6ZDw/640?wx_fmt=png&wxfrom=5&wx_lazy=1 https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/mmbiz_png/LB4LpUCAfNwtCCCtSYiaL9o2B7wy...
- jandrese 8y agoI'm sure the marketers made a big deal about it being "fully homegrown", but the engineers were like "that's a ton of duplicated effort, lets start with an open source browser and work from there." It will be interesting to see if they keep merging in changes from the head of the open source browser or if they continue to diverge over time.
- subway 8y agoIf the way the Kernel is used in China acts as any indicator, it'll be a hard fork that gets discarded every few years for a new hard fork.
- jandrese 8y agoOuch, that's the worst of both worlds approach. Insecure and you get all of the work to re-port the code regularly.
- lawlessone 8y ago>and you get all of the work to re-port the code regularly. Secure job though, with predictable repeatable work.
- jerf 8y ago"The company announced that in the latest round of fundraising it had raised a cool 250 million yuan ($36) from investors that included government agencies." Hmmm... I seem to have missed out on some super-Venezuela levels of hyperinflation happening to the yuan at some point here. You think that'd be the real news.
- Sacho 8y agoIf you weren't joking, that's a typo, the exchange rate is roughly 7:1
- wemdyjreichert 8y agoIt's a jibe at the instability of the yuan. Mostly because it's built on a communist house of cards (rather than a real economy) and propped up by one of the most abusive and authoritarian governments in existence.
- jerf 8y agoNo, it was just a swipe at a particularly egregious and amusing typo. I don't generally see things wrong by six orders of magnitude like that. I suspect some sort of automated system that attempts to translate "(\d+).*yuan" into dollars automatically, so it translated 250...yuan into $36. If indeed the yuan had collapsed by a factor of one million since I last checked the news last night, I don't think even the infinite canvas of online news would have a lot of room to be discussing browser plagiarism amidst the torrent of commentary about China's currency collapse and the imminent and/or occurring collapse of the international economy. If there's anybody with some yuan on hand, I'm willing to offer you a heck of a deal. I'll happily give you $72 for your 250 million yuan. I'm taking a bath on this deal, but I like HN that much and I'm willing to cut you a favor.
- dsl 8y agoI have 250 million yuan for you, you'll just need to pay a few small import taxes. Please contact my finance agent on his yahoo mail address...
- CSEThrowaway 8y ago> ...it includes important independent innovations Meaning they send your browsing data to Chinese government agencies?
- tehlike 8y agoOr have a backdoor to give full control
- Osmanthus 8y agoIt claims to be secure,yet using the outdated Chrome 49, and it installs a Sangfor root certificate, I guess that's why their boss stressed that their customers are very satisfied, their were able to thoroughly monitor their employees.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI'd rather be part of the Chinese botnet than the American one.
- ForHackernews 8y agoWhat about Maxthon? I remember trying it back in the day and it was pretty decent, better than IE of the time, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon
- est 8y agoMaxthon is based on IE.
- ForHackernews 8y agoIIRC, it uses the Trident rendering engine, but all the browser UX and chrome is custom. Most browsers are wrapping webkit today, does that make Opera and Safari clones of Chrome? Not sure.
- gumby 8y ago> does that make Opera and Safari clones of Chrome? Umm, Webkit spun out of Safari, so that would make Chrome the "clone" of Safari. Which is rather your point. Chrome has made a lot of changes to Webkit over the years, and these days appears to be putting more effort into it than Apple is.
- jeffbax 8y agoKHTML -> WebKit -> Blink Implying that WebKit somehow stalled because Google forked it into Blink is silly. Apple and Google are both investing heavily in their browsers, just with different priorities. Doesn't take more than just looking at the WebKit blog to see that.
- gumby 8y agoYes! Thanks, I'd forgotten about KHTML blush. I use Safari by preference and wish Apple would push harder, but perhaps my attitude is a little unfair.
- 8y ago
- EliRivers 8y agoAs an aside, on the subject of writing a browser from scratch, I once had a meeting with my technical director (many jobs past) in which the proposed solution to some oddities in the Qt web browser widget of the day (this would have been around early 2010s, using Qt 4.8.x, I think) was for us to write our own. Apparently this was a basic, simple task that was commonly set in introductory programming textbooks, and should take me a half-day or so to get something basic running. I pointed out that when Netscape decided to rewrite their browser, with all the knowledge they had of how browsers work, they spent three years doing it, and that was a decade and a half previously when the web was orders of magnitude more simple. I sometimes wonder how out of context he was. Or I was? What did he think a browser was? Were we speaking at massive cross-purposes? Did he mean we should grab some other web engine and find a way to use that? Even so, a half-day to get something going? And just what introductory programming textbooks was he reading? Where was I going with this? Somewhere along the lines of how "write a browser" clearly can mean massively different things to different people, or maybe that there can be an enormous gulf of context and understanding there somewhere. To this day, I still don't know. Never will.
- Wellshit 8y agoManagers managing
- jcranmer 8y agoThere are essentially six pieces to a browser: a platform support library, a graphics rendering platform, a networking layer, the HTML/CSS rendering, the JS VM integration, and the browser shell on top of all of it. Getting a first cut of really basic HTML rendering--essentially saying, here's a string that's X color and Y font, display it--is probably doable in a day if you have robust implementations of everything else. I have to imagine your director thought that doing HTML rendering was "all" you'd have to do. Of course, what makes building browsers especially hard is there is very tight integration between all of these different components, so that you have to maintain all of these pieces.
- evmar 8y agoPerhaps he meant "write an app that uses an HTML rendering widget that also has the networking components built in"? In the old days of Chrome you'd occasionally see WebKit engineers griping about how Chrome was taking all the credit for just repackaging WebKit. I remember wondering about this at some point and noticing the code was roughly 50-50 Chrome/WebKit in terms of size (which is a fraught measurement always but hopefully gives you the idea). To be sure the HTML-rendering part of a browser is a central piece of it, but the Chrome part included stuff like v8, the Windows port of WebKit, the network stack, the multiprocess architecture, all the browser widgetry like tabs, bookmarks, and the fancy URL bar, and so on. So I guess even for people who are close to this it's hard to say what making a browser entails.
- btown 8y agoLooking at what it takes to actually implement the "belly of the beast" from scratch, I don't blame them. (Also, after seeing the below 350-line function that's part of a 3113-line file, I now know that whenever I'm yelling at CSS layout behaving weirdly, there's someone with a much, much more frustrating job.) https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/components/layout/block.rs#L755 https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/components/layout... EDIT: for anyone who doesn't know, https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ is Mozilla's ambitious project to rewrite their browser from scratch with concurrency thought in from the beginning, supported by Rust's unique approach to safe concurrency. Parts of it have already made it into Firefox: https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html
- ConfusedDog 8y agoThis is fraud, not a miscommunication between marketers and developers. China is known for fraudulent businessmen cheat out of a lot of money and ran to other countries. I believe this is a case of that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoIt's sad to see that even with a rewrite (Servo), the code becomes so hairy. In my ideal world, browsers are spec'd in a functional language, and optimized mechanically (perhaps based on ad-hoc human guidelines).
- smaddox 8y agoThat's hairy? It looks pretty clean to me. Sure, there are a lot of match cases, but they follow a fairly clean and clear pattern. Pulling them out into a hundred single-use functions certainly wouldn't make it easier to understand.
- cheez 8y agolol https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/blob/48d710e2cb4c462c7b21d6c8a076540a8b1998a4/lib/Target/X86/X86ISelLowering.cpp https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/blob/48d710e2cb4c462c7b2...
- jerkstate 8y agoSo what, Google Chrome is a Konqueror clone
- intsunny 8y agoThat has never been true. (I say this as a fan of KDE, and a user of Konq back in the KDE2x/Mandriva days.)
- phyalow 8y agoSource: http://yuanchuang.caijing.com.cn/2018/0816/4501631.shtml http://yuanchuang.caijing.com.cn/2018/0816/4501631.shtml Classic - he mentions not wanting to rip off state funds and government agencies multiple times. Thats exactly what he did though ;) I hope this isn't the last anyone ever hears from Chen Benfeng - "The special expert of the National Thousand Talents Program”.
- 394549 8y agoApparently the same is true of their "fully homegrown" 3G cellular network standard. According to this [1] TD-SCDMA, is really an implementation of a failed European standards proposal by Siemens. [1] https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/ https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/
- wemdyjreichert 8y ago[deleted]
- readhn 8y agoYou contradict yourself: at least 50%+ of things you purchase with your hard earned money is made in china. I suppose you dont purchase anything useful then.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- readhn 8y agoSo What? There is nothing new under the sun. Be glad you are good enough to be copied and imitated. C Also: copy 80% of a successful product and innovate/improve another (core) 20% is a very smart business approach. Kudos an good luck to the Chinese for the attempt to disrupt monopoly in this space.
- emodendroket 8y agoI mean it's fine, except that they falsely claimed it was wholly original.
- greatabel 8y agoThings is not as simple as it looks. Some Chinese say the founder of 'Redcore' is officiallings. There cound be some collusion between the referee and the athlete, when he get his fundraising.
- Shorel 8y agoJust like new Opera and Vivaldi browsers.
- detaro 8y agoWhere did those claim to not be based on Chromium?
- coldtea 8y agoWhere did this one claim to not be based on Chromium? Homegrown can just mean "the UI and core behavior parts" not not using any third party libs (including rendering) at all.
- kalleboo 8y ago> At the same time, on the company's official website, the Red Core browser was also described as "breaking the US monopoly, China's first independent innovation smart browser core." They clearly sold it as their own rendering engine, not just a UI shell. Although I guess due to vague wording it wouldn't necessarily preclude being a fork of Blink.
- originalsimba 8y agoIt really shows how immature nations like Russia and China are when their government is more focused on being Internet Indepedent from the rest of the planet, instead of their never ending human rights abuses or their barely-functional economies. Trying to inject Nationalism into the internet only shows a lack of understanding what the whole thing is about anyway. The irony of course is that Russia and China have a much older and greater history than America. But the internet isn't about intra-planet competition, and neither is America for that matter. America is an experiment, utilizing all the world's best (and some of the worst) people, to build the most advanced nation based on current "best practices" in governance and society. The Internet is ours, like it or not, and we deserve it. These world super powers should stop trying to win the space race, and start learning the lesson about a global community that our internet has been trying to teach them for decades.
- whooshee 8y agoI have to say, most Chinese don't know this crap till today. So nobody would say this is a fully homegrown web browser. It's more like someone wanna wash their cash..
- emodendroket 8y agoStill not as embarrassing a flop as Cuil.
- huxflux 8y agoMight have been a flop, I agree on that. Yet here you are, mention it twelve years later.
- emodendroket 8y agoYes, and this morning I was reading about Napoleon's Russian campaign, which took place more than 200 years ago. Not sure what that proves.
- cwperkins 8y agoHas China made anything original?
- coldtea 8y agoYes tons. Besides this cliche was said for the US (back when it copied European inventions in the 18th and 19th century to bootstrap its industry) and Japan in the 60s and 70s (which started by copying western products). Funny how those two places turned out...
- allreddy 8y agoAnd this is some sort of surprise?
- dbllxr 8y agoFirst of all, good luck to the newly launched YC China. I'm shocked with that much funding, this startup would choose to either or both a) plagiarize, b) falsely advertise, and they didn't even do it well. I'd say the effort is worth $36 without the million. Both of these actions (plagiarism, fraud) have ethical and legal implications, but it sounds like they are getting away with this by admitting to the public what they did.. That makes me think the investors were already aware/supportive of the whole stunt. Is this what the startup scene is like in China? I certainly hope not.. but still, it will take heck a lot more innovation from this company for people to ever trust them again.
- adventured 8y agoSomeone did the same thing during the dotcom bubble with Microsoft's media player. They pretended to have a new, revolutionary media player technology (which was actually just a skin), and raised ~$18m on the back of that. It all got vaporized, there never was a real product underneath. I wouldn't chalk this particular instance up to anything more than loose capital ending up in fraudster hands, as occasionally happens when it's sloshing around to such a degree as it is these days.
- yawz 8y agoThe title reminds me of a Silicon Valley (HBO) episode. I can imagine a big whiteboard, and one of the product ideas on it is called New Chrome.
- Proven 8y agoRed Flag Linux
- c-smile 8y ago"The company announced that in the latest round of fundraising it had raised a cool 250 million yuan ($36) from investors that included government agencies." I want that too. Just if someone else need their national browser too - I am here with my Sciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com) - it is an independent implementation of HTML/CSS and universal Web browser can be made from it with 6-9 months ETA.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoOh so in essence this is so root of all those annoying ugly ass anti-virus UIs that make it impossible to take them seriously in any way whatsoever. ;)
- ada1981 8y agoDoes it surprise anyone that China would copy someone else’s IP?
- ada1981 8y agoDownvotes because China has amazing respect for IP, or something else?
- iforgotpassword 8y agoDown votes because "China" is a country of 1.4 billion people and not a single hive minded unit. Also this was clearly a simple scam to rake in investor money, they just told people what they wanted to hear so they'd throw money at them. Has never happened in the west huh?
- ada1981 8y agoAdmittedly, I don’t know the details of this particular situation outside of “yet another copyright / IP scam in China”. Culture is bigger than any individual. IP & Copyright are not part of Chinese history or culture and were largely impositions from The west within the last 50 years. Something like 90% of all business software running in China is stolen. Additionally, Marxist ideas of collective ownership have left their mark. https://www.cio.com/article/2444480/it-organization/understanding-chinese-attitudes-towards-intellectual-property--ip--rights.html https://www.cio.com/article/2444480/it-organization/understa...
- coldtea 8y agoWell, it wasn't in China where the ideas that "software patents are evil" and "copyrighted software is wrong" spurted a whole movement...
- remusrm 8y agothe best things that china does is copy
- crb002 8y agoSurprise level: 0