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.
Posted by: Kyle Huey | June 26, 2009 4:11 AM
Does this basically leave them with no way to connect Macs to the Internet (save for using IE 5.2 for Mac)?
Also, what about having a Firefox plug-in similar to IE View that would automatically switch to the IE rendering engine just for secure pages -- at least as a temporary measure?
Posted by: Travis | June 26, 2009 5:04 AM
Wow. You learn something new every day. I find surprising that they mandated ActiveX in the first place, but even more shocking that they did not question it until now. ActiveX has been virtually deprecated by Microsoft for a while, though still supported in their products.
Posted by: Themask | June 26, 2009 6:32 AM
@Kyle
Ever hear of Google Translate or Babel Fish?
Google translate seems to work just fine for the "fantastic leadership" (Channy's Blog http://xrl.in/2kb0) link and nearly every other site that I come across that is not written in English.
I wouldn't want a World where everything HAD to be written in English. I have more friends online who's native language is not English than those that are yet they all speak, read, and write English while most people who's native language is English, only speak English.
What's that tell you about Americans?
Posted by: Ken Saunders | June 26, 2009 11:46 AM
That's indeed good news; been a long time coming. Here's more background:
http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monoculture/
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/01/activex_in_kore.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=412
http://dashes.com/anil/2007/01/south-koreas-in.html
I went searching for whether there would be a parallel Netscape Plugin to enable this in non-ActiveX browsers, but so far have just found other high-level articles, such as this one from November on the liberalization:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/11/123_34713.html
jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell | June 26, 2009 12:21 PM
@Ken paragraph 1: Very true.
@Ken paragraph 2: Get off your high horse.
Posted by: Daniel | June 26, 2009 12:46 PM
@Ken Paragraph 1: Thanks. I didn't know that Google's translator had gotten this good.
@Ken Paragraph 2: I'm not saying that the entire internet has to be in English, just that Korean is not among the three languages I can read/write with some fluency, and I don't think I'm going to get around to learning it in the immediate future. My apologies if slipping the English reference in there came off as haughty.
@John: Thanks for the information.
Posted by: Kyle Huey | June 27, 2009 3:55 AM
I'm contacting friends in Korea to confirm the status of this news item.
Until we get a technical explanation of how the Korean govt. plans to provide services to users of Firefox or Safari, let's hold off on the celebrations.
Posted by: Gen Kanai | June 28, 2009 8:53 AM
"There's just no where else in the world where things are this broken"
Ever heard of... umm... China? while the Chinese government did not mandate the use of an ActiveX control, it's still the de facto standard for online banks and transactions in China. Only recently the biggest Chinese online shop site has released a NPAPI plugin for online payment, but that plugin is quite buggy and problematic so people still just use IE anyway. And you still simply have to use IE to log into any online bank.
And consider that China currently has the most number of internet users in the world, I guess the browser marketshare wouldn't look so good for Firefox (and other non-IE browser) if those stats tracking sites had more users in China (when most Chinese sites tend to use local stats trackers instead of hitslink and stuff). I think China is one of the few places where Firefox 3 share continues to DROP since its launch.
Posted by: timesone | June 28, 2009 10:57 PM
timesone, we have several full percentage points of usage share in China. That share is going up, slowly, but it is going up. That's considerably better than Korea where it's flat at near zero and has been for ever.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | June 29, 2009 7:26 AM
i was pleasantly surprised/downright amazed when i saw Naver and Daum (#1 and #2 korean search engines) both come out with firefox themes. perhaps this is the start of something good =D
Posted by: Andrew Choi | June 29, 2009 7:53 AM
Andrew, Daum and Naver are great. They've both taken a big interest in Firefox. My good friend Channy Yun has been responsible for so much of the improved landscape in Korea. See my post from a few years ago :-) Channy not only brought Daum up to speed with standards and Firefox support, he also worked with Daum's primary competitor and the Mozilla community to help bring them forward.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | June 29, 2009 8:32 AM
This is because Internet in Korea is the fastest in the world; this is not an opinion, but a fact. That's why Koreans don't care to use Firefox or any other browser, because as slow as Internet Explorer is, Internet is so fast in Korea that there is no difference in the speed as Firefox would have over IE in some other country like the US. And this ultimately led to the usage of no other browser than IE, and to its features only.
Posted by: Exsecrabilus | June 29, 2009 11:24 AM
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839
Will Firefox 3.6 do support SEED?
Posted by: another_sam | August 28, 2009 7:18 PM
Your links are botched.
Other than that, it's rather interesting that a national government mandated use of an ActiveX control. I'd be interested in learning more about the history of this. Anyone have any (English) links?