To be fair, Microsoft invested a lot more into catering for Korean users than anyone else.
Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's computer, and found out that he couldn't properly type Korean in his webmail program, while IE worked fine. You can guess what browser he decided to use.
That particular problem is fixed now, but the simple truth is that Microsoft got into the game way ahead of everyone else.
Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.
I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.
What I find most interesting about this article is the following irony: All of the security software in use causes users to habitually click Yes on any dialog any that comes up.
Weird, I was under the impression that South Korea was a free market type place. And why would they only allow ActiveX to used? What would happen if a sited decided to use something else to offer the same functionality? Would they get fined?
This sounds like what could have happened everywhere had AJAX and web 2.0 not happened. I remember the early 2000s when ActiveX seemed like one of few options to deliver functionality that wasn't thought possible with just HTML and Javascript - and it was even reasonable to go ahead and use it because everyone was on IE6 anyway.
That was exactly the situation in Brazil, 7 years ago, the dark age of the Brazilian internet, some users using Macs and Linux boxes (and also some Netscape fans out there that were using Windows) and web developers, myself included, "took back the web" with a couple of other browsers.
South Korea developed an online infrastructure fairly early and wanted encrypted transmissions. At the time the US was restricting the export of decent encryption as 'weapons grade' so South Korea came up with it’s own encryption standard called SEED. Because the browsers of the time didn’t support this natively the South Korean government created plugins to enable the functionality: an ActiveX one for IE and an NSAPI(?) one for Netscape 4.
Fast forward and Netscape 4 dies, leaving the plugin unloved and unmaintained. IE achieves market dominance and banks / shops etc start assuming that that’ll be the browser used. Now, when Gecko and Webkit start making inroads outside of South Korea they still don’t have native SEED support which means they can’t be used for secure transactions on the inside. SEED is mandated by the government along with the use of secure transactions for certain operations (online banking for one), so by proxy the use of the ActiveX plugin and therefore Internet Explorer.
Work was recently done to provide Firefox with native SEED support ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839 ) and that should make it in for Firefox 3.6. I guess then we’ll see whether it’s possible for a non-IE browser to gain any market share. Of course, the years of a Microsoft monoculture have caused problems with regards to building sites using web standards…
It looks like classic vendor lock-in. Some bank starts requiring ActiveX to log in at a time when IE had over 90% of the marketshare, soon all banks require it, and all Koreans that wanted to use an internet bank switched to IE because that was easiest.
And then everyone else designing web services in Korea knows that since everyone uses IE, they don't bother optimizing or even testing their web sites in anything but IE.
So when Firefox appears on the market, none of the bank websites work, and plenty of regular websites don't work or look like shit in it, so users never bother with it. It's a negative spiral.
Contrast that with the development in Sweden where I am: I switched banks in 1999 to one with a really good internet bank that used standard client certificates. It worked in all browsers on all platforms. Some other banks had mediocre internet services, some had services that required the users to install something proprietary windows-only, and some banks used a hardware authenticator. The ones with bad compatibility, the ones that didn't work on Mac or in Netscape got a lot of flak from consumers, and the ones with compatibility won all the awards and got a lot of good press and goodwill.
That was instead a positive spiral, and today the technologies that survived are standard client certificates or hardware authenticators, and it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all internet banks here are usable by everyone.
I wonder if there's a market for something which automatically sandboxes ActiveX controls. Isn't there a YC company which is doing something for applications which might be able to be reused?
EDIT: Of course, doing the marketing to convince people they need it is probably more challenging than the technical work.
[+] [-] akamaka|16 years ago|reply
Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's computer, and found out that he couldn't properly type Korean in his webmail program, while IE worked fine. You can guess what browser he decided to use.
That particular problem is fixed now, but the simple truth is that Microsoft got into the game way ahead of everyone else.
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.
[+] [-] metalkpretty|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbuwch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandros|16 years ago|reply
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-kor...
[+] [-] nkassis|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahpeeyem|16 years ago|reply
Dark days.
Edit: Oh, it's actually law! Oh my...
[+] [-] DougBTX|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zppx|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhansen|16 years ago|reply
This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that would spring up without reason.
[+] [-] robin_reala|16 years ago|reply
Fast forward and Netscape 4 dies, leaving the plugin unloved and unmaintained. IE achieves market dominance and banks / shops etc start assuming that that’ll be the browser used. Now, when Gecko and Webkit start making inroads outside of South Korea they still don’t have native SEED support which means they can’t be used for secure transactions on the inside. SEED is mandated by the government along with the use of secure transactions for certain operations (online banking for one), so by proxy the use of the ActiveX plugin and therefore Internet Explorer.
Work was recently done to provide Firefox with native SEED support ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839 ) and that should make it in for Firefox 3.6. I guess then we’ll see whether it’s possible for a non-IE browser to gain any market share. Of course, the years of a Microsoft monoculture have caused problems with regards to building sites using web standards…
[+] [-] henrikschroder|16 years ago|reply
And then everyone else designing web services in Korea knows that since everyone uses IE, they don't bother optimizing or even testing their web sites in anything but IE.
So when Firefox appears on the market, none of the bank websites work, and plenty of regular websites don't work or look like shit in it, so users never bother with it. It's a negative spiral.
Contrast that with the development in Sweden where I am: I switched banks in 1999 to one with a really good internet bank that used standard client certificates. It worked in all browsers on all platforms. Some other banks had mediocre internet services, some had services that required the users to install something proprietary windows-only, and some banks used a hardware authenticator. The ones with bad compatibility, the ones that didn't work on Mac or in Netscape got a lot of flak from consumers, and the ones with compatibility won all the awards and got a lot of good press and goodwill.
That was instead a positive spiral, and today the technologies that survived are standard client certificates or hardware authenticators, and it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all internet banks here are usable by everyone.
[+] [-] bensummers|16 years ago|reply
EDIT: Of course, doing the marketing to convince people they need it is probably more challenging than the technical work.
[+] [-] reedlaw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandros|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chanux|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|16 years ago|reply