The Korea Times is reporting that Koreans aren’t all that excited about Chrome; Google’s new web browser. This does not come as much of a surprise to me. If there is one thing you can say about Korea, it’s that when it comes to the internet, Korea is almost entirely reliant on Microsoft products and services and is doing little to move away from 90’s technology.
Most Korean Internet sites are reliant on Active-X, a program used to install software components on Web pages to enable particular functions, which can run on IE only. (Link)
Three words: Active-X sucks balls. The only sites I encounter that even use Active-X controls are Korean, and because Active-X is potentially very dangerous, the world of browsers, apart from IE, is pretty much just telling the technology to fuck off. Even Microsoft curbed Active-X capability in Vista, only to make concessions for the lucrative Korean market. But why are Korean sites so addicted to Active-X? Well the main reason is, yes of course it is, ridiculous government regulations.
The key reason ActiveX is mandated by financial institutions is that Korea has its own national encryption scheme called SEED that is used in place of SSL. The reason this came to be stemmed from the fact that US export law in the late 1990s didn’t permit the export of web browsers with more than 40 bit encryption. This meant that an ActiveX SEED plug-in was used in place of browser SSL. While there are Java and Netscape implementations of SEED, it was almost never implemented. ActiveX is so dominant that KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute) won’t even assign users security certificates unless they’re using Internet Explorer with ActiveX. (Link)
Continue Reading This Post Here
