The Chosun fails to grasp the concept of a beta release, not to mention the fact Korea is only 50 million people so tied to IE with Active-X its almost not worth it.
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Korean sites are slowly discarding ActiveX. Cyworld and Auction - two sites that previously had to be loaded in IE - are now mostly functional in Firefox. With a large number of Korean computers that still run Win2K or WinME, I’m surprised at how quickly Korean sites are responding to the Anti-ActiveX Vista.
Note the sarcasm. I’d be surprised if Korean sites become compliant by Christmas.
Dram-man, don’t you think this would have been better as a comment to
this postrather than a separate post on the same topic?Rob> I have egg on my face. I did not see the previous post.
Seeing how this one already has comments, I’ll delete mine.
“With a large number of Korean computers that still run Win2K or WinME, I’m surprised at how quickly Korean sites are responding to the Anti-ActiveX Vista.”
Silly me. I thought they were being kind to the foreigners who use Firefox.
To be fair, the situation has gotten a little better, although obviously not as quickly as I’d like as a FF user.
Considering that Korea considers itself the “IT Leader of the World”, I find it funny that none of the Korean web developers foresaw the day that the Active X will become useless.
I also find it ironic that the same web developers let Microsoft(a huge US corporation BTW) control their fate instead of making their web pages platform independent.
What continues to surprise me, mins0306, is that as far as I know, Korea has yet to produce an indigenous web browser.
Gizmodo said a funny about Safari for Windows:
Well, I thought is was cute. I gotta say, though, that Safari does run pretty quick, although I can’t even add a bookmark without it crashing. Perhaps it’s because it’s running on a Korean edition of Windows?
I like Apple products, so I thought I’d give Windows Safari Beta a chance. However, it couldn’t even bring up the freakin’ search bar in Google !
no Google search == browser in name only
Ever had KT tech support come in and try to hook up a Mac to the Internet? What a joke. They look at Macs like it’s more alien than the foreigner it belongs to. Even on my (English) windows machine, I won’t let those guys even come close to it because every time they do, I spend 2 hours after they leave fixing the damage from the bloatware they installed.
Robert has a very good point, for all their supposed IT expertise, why haven’t Koreans made their own browser?
For all you FF users (like myself), check out a plug-in called IE Tab(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419). If you have to visit sites that only work with IE, this cool little plug-in will allow you to switch Firefox to the IE engine so you can view activeX heavy pages in the Firefox browser. It can also be set so that it automatically switches to IE if you visit the same sites all the time, like Naver or Daum.
It’s apparent to me that “Korea Inc.” intensely fears Apple. The media never seems to miss an opportunity to run down Apple, whether it’s advancing spurious claims about lagging sales of the iPod (they’re going great guns), telling lies about iPhone, or now making a strike against Safari to reiterate the tired canard about “incompatibility” of Apple computers and software.
The Chosun article notes that Chinese and Japanese text display just fine; it’s only Korean sites that are a problem for Safari on Windows. Yet it doesn’t seem to occur to the Chosun that the problem might be the sites — Korean HTML coding practices could be the worst in the world. It’s not just the failure to specify encoding, either.
I’m no expert on this, but my understanding is that one of the problems with the Windows release of Safari is that it uses only the fonts it downloads with, which makes me wonder if this could perhaps be the problem with the Korean version.
The beta had a problem with listing the language encoding in the drag-down menus anyhow.
As usual, sites like ticketlink.co.kr and others like this just do not work with anything but IE and that is because they have poor site development. The companies just paid a little to get something that worked with IE, not something that was professional.
The Safari 1.0 release will be very good I bet — better than IE since it already loads faster than Firefox on my Windoze machine.
I haven’t tried Safari on Windows (who needs to when you’ve got a Mac?) but I’ve read that Safari/Win uses Apple’s own proprietary font-rendering technology. And Mac OS X comes with a different set of fonts from Windows (for example, Helvetica and Optima). Together with the Mac OS X font smoothing, those fonts are why web pages look much better on Mac. Since the purpose of Safari/Win is probably to be a testbed for development of iPhone apps — iPhone’s “SDK” is CSS/XHTML and Javascript to run on WebKit — it’s possible the browser comes with a big folder full of fonts. Is the Korean font not included? Whoops.
Better than IE? Shouldn’t be too difficult, seeing how IE is the shittiest browser in the known universe.
(ponders what the shittiest browser in the unknown universe is, thats almost Hegel-esque)
There’s a way to tweak Firefox so that it will run super fast. The difference is noticeable.
http://www.tweakfirefox.com/tweaks.php
#8 : Robert.
” What continues to surprise me, mins0306, is that as far as I know, Korea has yet to produce an indigenous web browser.”
The Korean IT industry is more geared to producing games, web pages or customized programs for corporate and government clients, using development tools and methodology that already exists. (ie Oracle, MS Visual Basic, etc)
It is not however geared for the type of programming that will create an OS or an Internet browser for that matter. On top of that the computer science graduates that Korean universities produce are not capable of carrying out the just mentioned type of programming.
SomeguyinKorea — You weren’t kidding. That Firefox tuneup really does lead to a noticeable boost in speed.
tz247: IE Tab just loads the IE Engine into a Firefox Tab, much like it can be loaded into other programs. It is not separate from IE, so I just use
“IE View” which loads IE in it’s own Window.
Rob,
Yes, it does. I was probably understating it when I said it was ‘noticeable’, too. It’s super fast. I remember when I first did the tweak; it felt like I had bought a new computer.
Apple’s recently posted update to the Safari beta, v3.0.2, fixes the Korean text display issue.
That’s good news UT. I think Apple will pull it together nicely.
I have read how in other countries, like Spain, they have the same problem with IT idiots that know nothing but Windows and IE and actually use a non-standard approach to many sites. I’m hoping Korea will beat Spain in this respect (and at football).
I use Safari on my Mac and installed on Windows XP using Parallels Desktop for Mac to test it. Firefox might be better than Safari, but I use Safari mostly, because Firefox (without tweak) has higher CPU usage rate than Safari’s, which makes my MacBook Pro slightly hotter when I use FF than when I use Safari.
There is an article about Safari showing richer color than some other browsers:
http://news.com.com/2100-1012-6191815.html