QQ Xuanfeng

» see xf.qq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There was a number in the corner of the window and it was the only thing anyone looked at. Kilobytes per second, updating once a second, and around it a progress bar and a time estimate that was always lying. A download manager was not software you had an opinion about. It was software you kept because it produced a bigger number than the last one you tried.

QQ Xuanfeng was Tencent's entry, released on 8 January 2009 and rebuilt out of an older client called Super Xuanfeng. It ran on Windows only and handled HTTP and FTP alongside BitTorrent and the eDonkey network, which was the standard feature set for the category. It came with a QQ account attached, which in China meant it came with everyone, since QQ was the account the entire consumer internet was built on.

That should have been the end of the argument. Tencent's method for two decades has been to watch a category, build its own version, and push it down the QQ install base until the original gives up. It worked on messaging and it worked on payments. It did not work here, and the reason it did not work is the number in the corner of the window.

I know exactly what this software was for, because I needed one. A 33.6k modem in Turkey in the late nineties meant a large file arrived over hours, and the line dropped, and without a manager that could resume you started again from zero. Every country had its own answer to that and none of the answers traveled. The problem was identical from Ankara to Shenzhen and the products solving it were national, because a download manager spreads by word of mouth and word of mouth stops at a language border.

~ the case file ~

~ what a download manager was for ~

Two things, and the first one is nearly forgotten now. Resume, which meant the software wrote down how far it had got so a dropped connection cost you seconds instead of the whole file. Segmentation, which meant it opened several connections to the same server at once and pulled different pieces of the file down each one, because a single stream rarely used the whole line and eight of them usually did.

Both of those are answers to a network that was expected to fail. Modern software assumes the transfer will complete and mostly it does, so the category quietly stopped existing rather than being killed by anything. The browser learned to resume, connections stopped dropping, and the last generation of these tools ended up as BitTorrent clients with a legacy HTTP feature bolted on the side.

~ offline download ~

The one clever feature here was 离线下载, offline download. You handed QQ Xuanfeng a link or a torrent, and rather than fetching it down your line, Tencent's servers fetched it to their own storage first. Then you pulled it off Tencent at whatever speed your connection could take, which was fast, because you were downloading from a data center instead of from a dying seedbox on the other side of the world.

It also meant the file kept downloading while your computer was off, and a torrent with two seeders became a torrent with one very good seeder the moment somebody else had already asked for it. Xunlei had the same idea and a bigger cache of files people had already requested, so it kept winning the comparison that mattered. Tencent added cloud playback on top and then switched that off in November 2014, which was the first visible sign the product was being wound down rather than developed.

~ the one category tencent lost ~

The last build, v4.8, shipped on 19 November 2015 and nothing came after it. The project group put a closure notice on the site on 3 August 2017 telling users to move anything they had stored off the service, and the whole thing stopped on 6 September, thirty-four days later, with the remaining data deleted. Chinese tech coverage of the shutdown ran under headlines about Xunlei having unified the field.

The lesson sits oddly against everything else Tencent has done. Distribution wins when the products are close enough that people cannot tell them apart, and a download manager is the rare consumer product that reports its own performance to you in real time, on screen, in a unit you understand. You do not need a review or a recommendation. You run both for ten minutes and keep the one with the bigger number, and no install base survives that.

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