Comment by gkanai

9 days ago

Back when I worked for Mozilla, I had the chance to go to Seoul to meet with various companies and some governmental ministries. This was when Korean banks and ecommerce sites required Internet Explorer and Active-X controls for secure transactions. This meant that MacOS users or Linux users couldnt do secure transactions in Korea without emulating Win/IE.

What was the outcome of these meetings? Have they switched to Firefox?

  • They never did afaict. Eventually smartphones became ubiquitous and I think most S. Koreans bank on their phones using apps. As for those who bank on computer, I dont know what happened when Active-X was deprecated. It was a poor decision by the S. Korean govt. to hang their hat on that technology.

  • They settled down with chromium based browsers. Microsoft was pushing Edge and Naver, the largest Korean search engine company, also developed Whale browser based on chromium.