

Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture - bensummers
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/10/27/2009102700899.html

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akamaka
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.

~~~
patio11
This, this, a thousand times this.

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.

~~~
robin_reala
Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen
this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on
localisation.

~~~
quant18
IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional
Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than
Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty
historian.) All the others:

1\. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour

2\. don't support vertical left-to-right layout

Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only
solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in
Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc.

[http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-
ie...](http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie8.html)

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mrbuwch
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.

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alexandros
Apparently it was (is?) a legal requirement to use ActiveX

[http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-
kor...](http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-korea.html)

~~~
nkassis
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?

~~~
idlewords
Monopolies are a natural phenomenon in unregulated markets. Not sure why you
think this situation could not arise in a free market.

~~~
nova
What free market? Intellectual "property" IS a government-given monopoly.

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ahpeeyem
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.

Dark days.

Edit: Oh, it's actually law! Oh my...

~~~
DougBTX
XMLHttpRequest is an ActiveX control in IE6...

~~~
ahpeeyem
Sorry I was referring more to the cultural or mindset change that made it cool
and trendy to build Web 2.0 style apps. Events like the coining of the term
"AJAX", as well as things like Google Maps and Gmail really pushing the
boundaries of what everyone perceived could be done with just
HTML/CSS/Javascript.

My theory was that the mindset shift didn't happen in South Korea for whatever
reason, meaning nobody moved away from ActiveX - but as it turns out, that
reason is legislative.

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zppx
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.

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mhansen
Is there any explanation as to why? Are other vendors not internationalizing
sufficiently to get traction in Korea?

This doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that would spring up without reason.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

~~~
dagw
_it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all
internet banks here are usable by everyone._

If only the same where true for the government websites. Taxes and various
social services webpages are still more or less impossible to log in to
without windows and IE (don't know how it is with Macs though).

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bensummers
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.

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reedlaw
It's basically the same in China, although more Mac stores are opening up.
Linux is virtually unheard of.

~~~
alexandros
what about <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux> ?

~~~
FooBarWidget
Almost nobody uses it.

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chanux
Like to discover how it feels to live without a choice. Maybe without even
knowing what is a choice.

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scotty79
Nice case study of what happens when delivering software is left solely to
corporations.

