Seoul — South Korea, one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, has few restrictions on what you can conveniently do online, unless you are using the wrong web browser.
With Google Chrome, you cannot make online business payments as a corporate customer of one of the largest foreign banks in Japan. If you’re using Apple’s Safari, you can’t apply for artist funding from the National Culture and Arts website. Also, if you are a childcare facility owner, Mozilla Firefox does not allow you to register your organization on the Ministry of Health website.
In all of these cases, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or similar alternatives are a must-have browser.
For Microsoft Shut down Internet Explorer, Or IE announced on June 15th that it will begin redirecting users to the new Edge browser within the next few months. This announcement influenced jokes and memes commemorating last year’s Internet. But in South Korea, IE is not an online deliverable. Obsolete browsers are still needed for a few important banking and government-related tasks that many people have to do.
Twenty-seven years after its introduction, its loyalty to South Korea’s now retired Internet Explorer is ironic. Known for burning broadband and innovative devices, countries are bound by buggy and insecure software that has been abandoned in most of the world. A long time ago.
Most Korean websites work on all browsers, including Google Chrome, which accounts for about 54% of the country’s internet usage.According to Internet Explorer is less than 1% Statcounter.. Still, after the announcement from Microsoft, there was a last-minute scramble between several important sites to prepare for post-IE life.
British Bank Standard Chartered Bank Korea Division Warning to corporate customers In May, you will need to start using the Edge browser in “IE mode” in order to access the “Straight2Bank” internet banking platform. Various websites of the Korean government have told users that some services may be interrupted if they do not switch to Edge.
In May, Naver, one of South Korea’s largest internet companies, emphasized the Whale browser’s ability to access sites that require Internet Explorer. Kim Hyo, who heads Naver’s Whale team, said the company initially added this option in 2016. He thought it was no longer needed when Microsoft shut down IE.
However, as the final day approached, Kim realized that some Korean websites weren’t in time, so he kept the functionality and named it “Internet Explorer mode.. Updating websites that have been IE-enabled for decades is a “very big task,” and some sites are “overdue.”
South Korea’s reliance on Internet Explorer dates back to the 1990s when South Korea became a pioneer in using the Internet for banking and shopping. To protect online transactions, the government passed a law in 1999 requiring encrypted digital certificates for issues that previously required personal signatures.
To verify an individual’s identity, we needed additional software called a plug-in to connect to the browser. The South Korean government has allowed five companies to issue such digital certificates using a Microsoft plug-in called ActiveX. However, the plugin only worked in Internet Explorer.
At the time, using Microsoft plug-ins seemed like a natural choice. Microsoft Windows software dominated the personal computer market in the 1990s, and Internet Explorer took advantage of its position to become the leading browser. As Korea’s major websites required IE, other websites began to support Microsoft’s browsers, increasing their importance. With one estimateInternet Explorer gained 99% market share in South Korea between 2004 and 2009.
“We were really the only game in town,” said James Kim, who headed Microsoft in South Korea from 2009 to 2015. Kim, who now heads the American Chamber of Commerce in Seoul, said Microsoft didn’t try to interfere. It’s a competition, but without IE, many things “did not work.”
Kim Kee-chan, a law professor at Korea University in Seoul, said that the crackdown on Internet Explorer against South Korea was so complete in the early 2000s that most Koreans couldn’t name another browser. “.
When Kim returned to South Korea in 2002 after teaching abroad, he realized that he couldn’t do anything online on his computer running Linux (a free open source alternative to Windows) and Firefox. I did. Each year, he went to an internet cafe and accessed a computer with IE to file a tax return on a government site.
In 2007, Kim filed a proceeding against the Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearing Corporation, one of the five government-approved private companies appointed to issue digital certificates. He claimed that the company that issued about 80% of South Korean certificates unfairly discriminated against him by disallowing other browsers.
Kim lost the case, lost his appeal, and lost the case in the national Supreme Court in three years.However, his legal struggle has received widespread attention, especially since then, to the pitfalls of the Korean system. 2009 cyber attack It exploited ActiveX to spread malware to Korean computers.
With the advent of smartphones, industries built on Apple and Google software have begun to reduce their reliance on Microsoft, as do many parts of the world. 2010, country Published guidelines Government websites need to be compatible with three different web browsers. However, it was not easy to change the Korean internet plumbing — especially because banks and credit card companies favored the existing system.
As public opinion changed, users suffered from the inconvenience of having to buy things online using ActiveX. Critics argued that the technology failed to achieve its purpose because the plug-in software actually made the user less secure.
Microsoft introduced Edge as an alternative to Internet Explorer in 2015, and said the company doesn’t support ActiveX in new browsers. Chrome became the country’s top browser three years ago.
In 2020, South Korea amended the 1999 law to eliminate the need for digital certificates. This is a move that seemed to conclude a book on ActiveX and Internet Explorer. That same year, Microsoft began removing IE support for some online services. A year later, the company announced plans to completely discontinue Internet Explorer.
Much of the world was joking about the end of Internet Explorer, but one of the Korean engineers marked this opportunity in a more solemn way.
Thirty-Nine-year-old software developer Jung Ki-young built an IE tombstone on the roof of his brother’s cafe in Gyeongju, South Korea, about 170 miles from Seoul. He paid $ 330 for a monument engraved with the browser’s recognizable “e” logo and the inscription “He was a great tool for downloading other browsers.”
Jung said he was dissatisfied with Internet Explorer, but felt that the browser that introduced many Koreans to the Web deserves a proper farewell. “Using Internet Explorer was difficult and frustrating, but it also served a good purpose,” says Jung. “I don’t feel good just to retire it with the attitude that I don’t need you anymore. “
