It's more than a month old, but this report is really encouraging.
Long ago, the Korean government mandated an ActiveX encryption scheme for all Korean secure transactions. This essentially locked out all not-IE browsers.
Because this requirement came early in Korea's adoption of the Internet, Korea has never had the multiple-browser culture that, in the West, persisted even after Netscape had been crushed by Microsoft. So, despite having an amazing infrastructure with 95% of the population connected via broadband and top of the line government and private sector services online, it's been an IE-only country with no other browser, not even Firefox, able to achieve any measurable share.
When I visited Korea a few years ago, I was surprised to learn how bad the problem was. I'd always assumed it was just a more extreme version of the "IE's got 95% of the market so everyone codes to it" problem we were all familiar with. It hadn't occurred to me that you simply couldn't do any online transactions if you weren't using IE. For all the brokenness of the Web in the years before Firefox, SSL was supported across browsers and platforms and while sites might have had display problems, and a few even blocking users, the technology didn't explicitly exclude Mozilla or other browsers.
There's just no where else in the world where things are this broken. I'm hopeful that with the Korean government taking the lead like this, and with Korea's top Web service providers like Daum committing to Web standards and cross-browser support, that things will start to turn around.
If we can get over this technical hurdle, we have an amazing Mozilla community in Korea with fantastic leadership that are poised and ready to take Firefox into the Korean mainstream in short order.
