Kinza

» see kinza.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Dayz called it the eternal youth browser. That was the actual tagline on the launch post of 22 May 2014, ten days after version 1.0.0 went out. It is an odd label for a Chromium fork, and it says exactly what Dayz believed it was selling. Kinza's pitch was proximity: a browser built in Nihonbashi by a team that read what Japanese users wrote to them and shipped changes in response, as against the world's major brands, which did not.

The implementation of that idea was to put the power-user features in the box. Mouse gestures came in version 1.3.0 that August and grew wheel and rocker variants before the year was out. A side panel picked up bookmarks in March 2015 and an RSS reader by that July. Super Drag let you select text, drag it, and get a search in a background tab or on an engine other than your default. Tree tabs and vertical tabs arrived in 2016, years before Firefox made vertical tabs a headline feature. There was a Boss Key. All of this shipped as part of the browser rather than as extensions you had to find, which in 2014 was most of the argument for using a fork at all.

The release notes read like a metronome. Version 1.1.0 landed in June 2014 and 1.2.0 in July, and the cadence held through 2015 and 2016 at roughly one feature release a month. The Mac build landed on 15 June 2016. In August that year Dayz started a bug bounty program with a Japanese security firm, which is an unusual amount of seriousness for a browser nobody outside Japan had heard of. Version 4.0.0 in June 2017 brought the 64-bit build. The last release of any kind was 6.9.0, on 10 May 2021.

~ the dossier ~

~ the boss key and the tree tabs ~

Install Kinza anywhere outside a Japanese locale and it did two things automatically: the interface came up in English, and the default search engine became DuckDuckGo. That is the honest measure of the distance here. The Japanese hospitality the browser advertised was a thing the browser itself knew it could not deliver in another language, so outside Japan it handed you a competent, anonymous Chromium and got out of the way. What was left was good tab management and no particular reason to stop using Chrome.

The one feature that traveled was the thing nobody asks for and everybody recognizes. A Boss Key is a hotkey that hides your browser instantly. It is an artifact of an era when the computer sat in an open-plan office or a shared room and somebody could walk behind you, and it survived into a 2014 Chromium build because a Japanese team was still listening to people who worked in those rooms.

~ the api that was taken away ~

On 9 July 2021 Dayz posted a notice headed, in brackets, "important". Development of Kinza was over. The reason given first was that Google had blocked access to the API that let the browser sync settings and bookmarks through a Google account, and the reason given second was profitability.

Google spent early 2021 closing that door on everyone. Chromium forks had been quietly using Google's private APIs for years, on keys that were never meant for them, and on 15 January 2021 Google announced it would remove access for third-party builds from 15 March, citing a security audit. Sync was the headline casualty, but translation and spell check went with it, which is a pointed loss for a browser whose selling point was features included rather than installed. Browsers with the resources to run sync themselves carried on. A browser maintained by a small studio in Tokyo took the cutoff. Its internal Chromium froze at 89.0.4389.128 and stopped receiving security updates, which makes the last six months of availability a period during which the official advice was not to use it.

Then Dayz did something generous. On 31 August 2021 it published Kinza's custom features as patches against Chromium, free, for anyone who wanted them. A company shutting down a product does not usually spend engineering time making its work reusable by whoever comes next.

~ where kinza.jp points now ~

Downloads stayed up until 31 December 2021, seven months after the last build. Today kinza.jp resolves and redirects to dayz.jp, which is a corporate site thirty kilobytes long, titled as a company that does not define its business domain and delivers individual talent to society. The word Kinza does not appear on it once.

There is one more loop worth closing. Dayz also ran a video search engine called Fooooo, which indexed something like 130 million clips, and Fooooo was set as Kinza's default search engine. Fooooo's last working front page was captured in November 2020; by that December it was redirecting to kinza.start.me, the browser's start page. So the portal was pointed at the browser a year before the browser was discontinued, and both URLs now land at the same company's homepage, which mentions neither of them.

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