Why Internet Explorer Still Dominates South Korea.

New submitter bmurray7 writes "You might think that the country that has the fastest average home internet speeds would be a first adapter of modern browsers. Instead, as the Washington Post reports, a payment processing security standard forces most South Koreans to rely upon Internet Explorer for online shopping. Since the standard uses a unique encryption algorithm, an ActiveX control is required to complete online purchases. As a result, many internet users are in the habit of approving all AtivceX control prompts, potentially exposing them to malware."

Timmay!

[Anonymous Coward]

AtivceX? Go, Timmay! You're a kickass editor!

Strange classification

[Anonymous Coward]

So IE 11 isn't a "modern browser"?

Years upon years of problems

[TWX]

I've seen similar issues all over the place, someone designs some proprietary-yet-essential service to use a proprietary plugin or other technology that's very platform and version specific. One just ends up using two web browsers, the old one that's required in order to make the stupid proprietary thing work, and the new one for one's normal browsing. It SUCKS from a support perspective as both browsers fight to be default, and users can't keep track of what pages load with what browser, etc, and that's not even beginning to address the security problems.

Bad summary

[21mhz]

The writeup assumes that no version of Internet Explorer can be thought of as a modern browser. This is not true for IE 10 and 11.

That said, a countrywide de-facto standard forcing vendor lock-in is bad.

Re:Strange classification

[Horshu]

It's Slashdot; what do you expect?

Re:Macs? Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs and Linux? Those *are* a tiny minority, especially Linux. Your main problem is: the *extremely* common Android doesn't support ActiveX, neither do common iOS devices, the Metro version of IE (Windows is very common too obviously) and the only version of IE for WinRT/Phone/Mobile/CE don't support it as well (although very uncommon). Oh, and not the x64 version of desktop IE. It also doesn't work in very common web browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Safari (anything besides IE). And it won't work on anything that doesn't have a x86 CPU. Relying on ActiveX in 2013 is insane.

Samsung Galaxy S series

[tepples]

Korea is a tiny country

...on whose soil is headquartered the company that makes smartphones whose popularity challenges Apple's. Besides, the Republic of Korea has about as many people as the entire West Coast of the USA (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii) combined.

there is no demand (and thus, no financial incentive) for anyone except the Korean government to implement SEED.

Or for anyone who wants to interoperate with Korea, such as users of web browsers that might get deployed on Korean devices. If Chromium supports SEED, for example, then Samsung phones, tablets, and phablets shipping with Chrome for Android will support SEED by default. Likewise with Firefox for Android.