Baidu Browser

Description

The Windows PC version of Baidu Browser is no longer active software. Baidu stopped doing that in May 2019 and shut down its core web browsing functions on September 29, 2019. Download sites still have the last build, and some still have it listed as current software, but the browser no longer receives security updates or active development for Windows. Users that find it on download sites and install it are running abandoned software on a years-old Chromium base.

Baidu’s browser product still lives on Android and iOS, where active development has been ongoing separately from the defunct PC version.

OVERVIEW

Baidu is China’s leading search engine — the company Robin Li and Eric Xu founded in January 2000, which has about 56% of China’s search market and more than 77% of mobile search in China. The browser was a logical extension of that position. In a market where Google is largely inaccessible due to the Great Firewall, Baidu developed an integrated product that linked its search engine, maps, cloud storage and more through a single browser window. For users within China, this made some practical sense in the way that Chrome and Google’s ecosystem make sense together elsewhere.

The history of the Windows browser dates back to 2011, when Baidu first released it as a Chromium-based browser for the Chinese market. Around 2013, Baidu released an international version, called Spark Browser, in an effort to get users outside China. The international version removed some of the China-specific integrations and added features targeting a more general audience — social media widgets for Facebook and WhatsApp, a media downloader, mouse gestures, a built-in torrent client, and a video pop-out player. By 2015, Baidu removed the Spark name and reverted to Baidu Browser in the international markets. By 2019, the entire PC product line was discontinued.

The Android and mobile versions continued under separate development. Baidu’s mobile browser is still active in China, and is integrated with Baidu Search and Baidu’s wider ecosystem of services.

WHAT THE WINDOWS Version Offered

The Windows browser based its feature set on tools other browsers had to use extensions to reproduce.

The media downloader identified video and audio on web pages and displayed a download button above the content. Users were able to choose a quality level and save the file directly without a third-party download manager. The downloader dealt with YouTube and Vimeo and hundreds of other video hosting sites.

The built-in torrent client allowed users to download .torrent files and magnet links directly in the browser. Opening a torrent link opened the download manager inside the browser instead of being handed off to an external application. This was one of the more unusual features for a general-audience browser — few mainstream browsers have ever included a native torrent client.

Mouse gestures allow users to move around by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse cursor. Drawing left or right went through browsing history; other movements opened or closed tabs, reloaded pages, or performed other common actions.

The video pop-out feature took a playing video from its tab and placed it in a separate floating window that could be moved to any part of the desktop while browsing continued in the main browser window. Users watching a video could move to different pages without losing the video.

A screenshot tool took either a selected region or all scrollable content of a page, not just the visible viewport.

Sidebar tools provided quick access to notepad, calculator, weather display, and recently downloaded files without opening separate applications.

The browser accepted Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web Store (the Chromium base made them compatible). Standard Chrome themes worked as well.

BAIDU IN THE CHINA Internet Ecosystem

Understanding what Baidu Browser meant in its domestic market requires an understanding of how the Chinese internet works. Google, which is the engine behind most browser activity worldwide, does not operate in mainland China in any meaningful way. The Great Firewall blocks Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and most Google services. Chrome works in China but it is running without most of its backend services. Users in China who wish to have their browser integrated with search, maps, navigation, translation, and cloud storage require a domestic alternative.

Baidu filled that role. The browser linked to Baidu Search as its default search engine, Baidu Maps, Baidu Wangpan (the cloud storage service) and Baidu’s advertising and content infrastructure. For Chinese users in 2015, when the browser’s penetration rate reached approximately 29% among Chinese internet users according to China Internet Watch, it made the same kind of sense as Chrome makes for someone deep in Google’s ecosystem.

The browser also had a proxy function that allowed users to access certain websites that were normally blocked in China by sending the requests through Baidu’s servers. Baidu said it worked with Chinese regulators in implementing this feature — which left open the question of what data the proxy collected and retained.

THE CITIZEN LAB REPORT

In February 2016, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs released a detailed report on Baidu Browser’s privacy and security practices. The findings were serious.

The Windows version sent search terms, hard drive serial numbers, wireless MAC addresses, URLs and titles of all visited webpages, and CPU model numbers to Baidu’s servers. Much of this data traveled without any encryption, or with encryption that was so weak that it could be decrypted easily. The Android version sent GPS data, IMEI numbers, and a list of nearby wireless networks as well as browsing data — also largely unencrypted.

Neither the Windows nor the Android versions secured software updates with code signatures. This meant that a malicious actor with network access could intercept an update request and make the browser download and execute arbitrary code — a serious vulnerability that went beyond privacy concerns into active security risk.

The researchers traced much of the data leakage back to Baidu’s own analytics SDK that Baidu had embedded across its product line and licensed to third parties. The same SDK was found in 22,548 other app packages in major app stores, meaning that the data collection practices were not limited to the browser itself.

The Citizen Lab informed Baidu in November 2015. Baidu issued some updates in February 2016, but the follow-up analysis by the researchers showed that many of the problems were still unpatched after the patches were applied. Baidu responded to questions from the researchers in writing but declined to answer directly whether Chinese law required it to retain and share user data collected through the proxy feature.

The report touched on something beyond the usual criticism of corporate data collection: Baidu is a Chinese company, and is therefore subject to Chinese law, which requires companies to cooperate with government intelligence and law enforcement requests. The data the browser collected — device identifiers, location, complete browsing history, visited pages — would offer detailed surveillance capability to anyone who received it. Whether that happened in any particular case, the researchers could not determine, but the infrastructure for it was there.

CURRENT STATUS

The Windows PC browser ceased to work as a web browser in September 2019. Any download of the copy today is the last build before shutdown — it runs on a version of Chromium from that time, has no security patches applied since then, and no update mechanism. Chromium security vulnerabilities found and patched in Chrome between 2019 and the present are still unpatched in any running Baidu Browser installation.

Download sites are still hosting and promoting the final build. Some describe it as a current product. It is not.

For those who see Baidu Browser on a Windows computer, the solution is to uninstall it and install a maintained browser.

The mobile products — Android and iOS — are still alive and well in the Chinese market, run by Baidu as part of its overall mobile services ecosystem. The mobile browser has not been the focus of the same level of independent security analysis since the Citizen Lab report of 2016. Users outside China have little reason to use the mobile product, and the concerns raised in 2016 about data collection and transmission to Baidu’s servers were not conclusively resolved.

BAIDU AS A COMPANY

Baidu is still one of the largest technology companies in China, publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker BIDU. The company’s search engine has about 56% of China’s desktop search market and more than 77% of China’s mobile search market as of early 2025. Its Baidu App’s monthly active users reached 724 million in March 2025. The company has grown significantly beyond search with Apollo Go, AI development with its ERNIE large language models, and cloud computing.

The browser was one product among many, and not one that Baidu wanted to maintain for international Windows users beyond 2019.