Taken from here. Larger version here.
Of course, if you use a computer in Korea, this comes as no surprise. A story I like to tell illustrates this. I was once working on a website project with a Korean web designer. I asked that the site work in Firefox, too, and the designer responded, “What’s Firefox?”
On a positive note, I’ve been to a couple of PC bang with Open Office installed on the systems.
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불여우.
or as my mum calls me 불여시
even funnier is since i re-set my linux system in korean it says “그놈이 정상으로 작동하고 있읍니다 blah blah”…it cracks me up every time.
그놈 this 그놈 that.
It’s really quite pathetic that Koreans lay claim to being some kind of super-advanced, most-wired country in the world, while their web designers and coders remain addicted to table-based layouts, animated GIFs, Adobe Flash, and ActiveX controls. Ten years of technological advances and Internet best practices have passed Korea right by, while the frogs remain blissfully unaware. “What’s Firefox,” indeed!
I just spent spent the last few days trying to research new car insurance companies online as mine was coming up for renewal. None of them accepted Firefox or Safari on my Mac, so I had to start up Windows and use horrible old Explorer. Even then, all but one site required me to install a different activeX controls and plugins just to view the main page. I wasn’t logging in or anything, just trying to get basic info. Eventually, I got so annoyed that I just gave up and went with the company I already had.
Korean internet blows.
Also, don’t they still play Starcraft in Korea? Isn’t that game like 15 years old?
only reason i still have explorer is for behind-the-curve korean websites.
What’s Somalia’s excuse?
Check out the >50% countries. Some expected ones like Germany & Finland, but Myanmar and Cuba, too? Wonder if the ease of Tor’s integration w/ Firewall is the reason.
Korea’s waiting for the ‘Firefox of Nine Tails’ to be released before jumping onto the bandwagon.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Google Chrome is much better and twice as faster than the Firefox, and more reliable.
In the past, I’ve had number of issues with the Firefox, with freeze ups and crashings. The firefox automatic updating is also problematic sometimes.
If y0u have not used Chrome, I highly recommend it.
I’m a Firefox devotee, who in intensive use of the browser in Mac Leopard and Snow Leopard has experienced no significant problems of any kind with it (other than the problems accessing Korean sites detailed above).
Is CM using Mac Os or, shudder, Windows? It might explain the freezes and crashes…
Brendon, how about an update on the iPhone in Korea? Would greatly appreciate it. Saw the second round of “it is now approved” last week…
Mongolia is one of those >50% countries, too.
You fools!!!! IE 5.0 for life!
rmeurant — According to sources inside KT, who after all are the distributor of iPhone, you will be able to buy an iPhone from Nov. 28. I think that means physical possession of the device from that date.
This is Apple, though, and the company may have other plans not disclosed to anyone. So don’t plan your life around the 28th or anything. Still, as for me, I think it’s real.
I’d recommend purchase at one of the Frisbee stores, if only because they have English-speaking Mac-using staff. I know the owner, so I hope that means some preferential treatment for your ol’ Uncle B if supplies are short. (Of course, if you believe the Korean press, iPhone will be an abject failure here in “special Korea”, but I think a lot will be sold next week, especially at the price points KT intends.)
There are five Frisbee locations — Myongdong, Hongdae, Kangnam Station (next to Kyobo Tower), Taejon and Pusan — so most any Marmot’s Hole reader can easily get to one.
cm — If you like the Google Chrome browser, you owe Apple a note of thanks. Chrome is an app wrapper around WebKit, the open-source HTML engine formerly known as KHTML, for which Apple Inc. employs many programmers devoted to advancing the project. WebKit also powers iPhone and Safari on Mac OS X (and the Google Android phone, Palm Pre, Symbian S60, and possibly a forthcoming Blackberry). Aggregating Safari on Mac OS and iPhone together with Chrome and those other mobile platforms, WebKit now accounts for about 20% of all web browser visits in the United States.
But you might also just as well download Safari for Windows, and also take the benefit of WebKit and Apple’s screen-rendering technologies on top of that. Or take the plunge and get a Mac.
mkaplan — Not only do they play it, Koreans also watch other people play Starcraft on television. I don’t know much about PC games, but I can only presume Starcraft remains so popular because it is easily pirated while other games have better protections. Koreans don’t pay for software, preferring to steal it instead, which is why the game companies here have all moved to network server-based fantasy universes for which a “service fee” can be charged.
Korea is basically stuck with Internet Explorer 6 forever, since more than 70% of Windows installations here use the same Windows XP “corporate” CD-Key. Korean pirates are locked out of Windows XP service packs, for which selfish Microsoft insists on a license key, and the service packs are required for IE 7 and IE 8. Since nobody here has ever heard of Firefox, I think we’re screwed on the browser front.
Don’t blame koreans on this one. You ain’t gonna get too far in the korean broswer market with a name like 파이어팍스.
아이폰 on the other hand sounds much more doable.
chrome
“Or take the plunge and get a Mac.”
No never ever!. I can’t live without the versatility and compatibility of the IBM clone PC. I wouldn’t mind running MAC as a virtual machine though, so that I can keep up.
Anyone know of a good program to run MAC on top of the PC?
You could try any number of different VM software– they all essentially do the same thing, but I think your biggest obstacle would be getting your hardware to work properly. The big reason Macs “just work” is because the OS is configured to a certain finite pieces of hardware which make up the Apple computer. With some effort, all you really need to do is get the right hardware and OS and you could build your own Mac for a lot cheaper than buying a brand name one, but it would go against the user agreement and would technically be illegal. You wouldn’t get any after service either. Or we would all be buying Mac clones.
Same issue with Linux, however with so many people in the opensource community writing software and drivers for the hardware, there is less of a problem since it becomes more of a matter of being technically adept at finding and installing the right drivers. If you were to build a computer that used the exact same hardware as a Mac, then you could probably install a duel-boot (or even a triple-boot machine, if you included Linux) machine and chose the your preferred OS at start up.
I mentioned this on another thread– If you are using Firefox and require IE sometimes, go to the Mozilla website and download the IE Tab add-on. Once you have it installed, you can open a new tab in Firefox using the IE rendering engine. Very useful for Korean sites. You can even configure it so it opens any *.co.kr address with the IE Tab automatically. I’m not sure if the same add-on would work in a Mac running Firefox, but it might be worth a try.
I love the speed of Chrome, but it doesn’t have any RSS feed support in the bookmarks, which is something I use every time I go online. Nor does it have any search bars available such as the google toolbar itself which also has the ability to run a search through Wikipedia, Google news, Google images and gmail from the same search field, I type it once and I have 5+ search options available. Chrome’s fast, but it is still very stunted as far as usability goes.
What I meant to mention and forgot, was that one of Windows greatest strengths (and arguably it’s weakest as well) is the ability to install it on any hardware configuration with a minimum of fuss and have it behave the same every time.
seriously i was only half joking when i said 불여우. it GOES by the name (애칭) 불여우 in korea unlike all the other computery things which just take the romanization . maybe robert could have asked his web-designer, 불여우 he/she *might* have known it..
this blog explains the naming
and this article attempts to explain the reason behind the slave-to-the-activex phenomenon in korea. from the article:
it’s a combination of being advanced too early on its own, (kinda like with everything else – cyworld, mobile phones, portals/search engine (naver-google) combined with the big people making the decisions who do not see the big picture and the small people who work for the big people just doing what is ordered. (typical korea really)
The gf and I decided to see a movie this weekend, so we checked the times online and decided to just go ahead and book them online… despite my apprehensions. I warned her that I might not have the patience to do this, but she encouraged that we go forward. More than 30 minutes, 2 perfectly valid credit cards, umpteen Active-X add-ons, 4 text messages (2 secret codes) to my cellphone, and one girl who during the “process” changed her mind about the “convenience” of the Korea internet, we had booked our tickets. Ironically, it would have taken the exact same amount of time to WALK to the damn theater and buy them at the counter, which I’ll do next time. Note, and I was ALREADY registered for all of websites necessary before starting the process. F— you, Korean internet.
Opera 10.0 the best browser!
All these *.NET and ActiveX apps are runs better on IE engine, so naturally Korea will stick with IE. Most Korean web service is running behind .NET servers. FF won’t handle .NET effectively. This is why when I use FF to browse Korean websites, it’s sloooow as hell.
I use IE and Opera.
Chrome/FF is for armature.
Mozilla maybe ought to promote it here as just 에프에프.
I think 불여우 would have a greater appeal, though perhaps cause some mouthwatering.
There’s a Firefox addon called IE Tab, which causes Firefox to behave like IE when you choose it do so for individual tabs. For most of the Korean websites I use, including banking and shopping, it works fine.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this fixes the problem, but it does save you having to actually use IE.
IE is called Window’s browser in Korea rather than 아이이 or 인터넷 탐색기. 파이어팍스? LoL
The IE Tab add-on for Firefox mentioned by Cymrodor and tz247 is the only way to fly. They actually bundle it with the Hanguel text support add-on.
Now, as to the design of Korean websites, that’s a whole ‘nother story. I suspect there are cultural differences at work.
I use User Agent spoofing to get around a lot of blocked Korean sites, though that doesn’t work when they have ActiveX garbage on them.
iPhone’s for real — I see that Korea Telecom is taking pre-orders for delivery on the 28th. And they’ve got a website up (Korean only, Adobe Flash-heavy, but what can you do?) describing the iPhone rate plans.
A 16GB iPhone 3GS will be “free” to subscribers who pay a W30,000 activation fee and take a 24-month contract with a 3GB data plan (that’s 3G data transmission only; WiFi is free and KT NESPOT access is included in the rate plan) and 800 minutes of calls for W95,000 per month. If you want a 32GB iPhone 3GS it looks like W132,000 out of pocket but KT will take it in installments of W5,500 per month for the phone.
“Free” in this case means you agree to give the phone company W2,300,000 over two years while using that iPhone. For me it’s no big deal because I already spend that and only get to use a crappy Samsung phone. But I wonder: Won’t I be wanting to trade up on the new iPhone when it’s released next summer?
Koreans typically love flashy web sites with lots of gifs and popup boxes and sounds and other visual effects, thus the predictable results . Westerners prefer simplicity and speed, rather than flash. And Firefox is boring, it will never fulfill the role IE provides for Koreans.
Well, as we recently saw with the ifriendly.kr debacle, some Koreans are at least aware of the compatability issues with their sites and non-IE users:
http://briandeutsch.blogspot.c.....screw.html
IE Tab download:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
cm, yous should have check out Chinese and Japanese websites. They have even more gifs and popups than these of Koreans.
Many thanks Brendon for the updates about the iPhone.
rmeurant — Nobody get too excited about iPhone just yet. Here is still Korea, and that means plenty of stupidity, closed thinking and discrimination against you, Mr. Foreigner.
A long-term expat friend just called me up to rant and rave about KT and the difficulty KT has thrown up in front of him as he has tried to reserve an iPhone today. My friend is a Korean-speaking director-level general counsel in a foreign investment bank here in Seoul. Like me, he’s been living here more than a decade.
KT told my friend they can only sell to a foreigner whose visa term has more than 24 months remaining. As nobody’s F-2, D-7, D-8, or E-7 visa is likely to have 24 months remaining at the time of issue (I’ve had one F-2 issued to me with 24 months once, but traditionally the visa is issued on a one-year term), this policy of KT’s effectively means no foreign residents of Korea may purchase an iPhone. Nice. Since my guess is this is an audience which has been rabidly awaiting iPhone’s arrival, Apple is going to miss out on thousands of sales unless KT can come up with a more sensible credit-risk evaluation policy.
After all, the usual reason advanced for denial of services to foreigners is “You could leave Korea at any time.” Such a statement also applies to any Korean citizen as well — they can travel visa free to more than 60 countries, whereupon they could disappear into the crowd.
Maybe they should insist on a deposit to cover their expected subsidy cost until the contract’s up or something, but simply denying sales based on nationality alone, without reference to other factors such as length of residence (my friend and I have been here over 10 years each — are we really going to abscond tomorrow with KT’s iPhone?) is really ham-handed and inconsiderate. Just what we long-term expats are accustomed to…
For me it’s not going to be a barrier, because I just send my Korean-citizen wife to take care of the sign-up process. Those of you who are employed in a company may have the company hold your phone account (like a hostage!) while you work there, thus side-stepping the visa issue, or offer a guarantee of your liability to KT in the case you run off. But for many of you, I expect KT has only indignity and frustration to offer you instead of a shiny new iPhone. Try not to hate me when I flash mine around.
which is why my phone contract is with SK, who also happen to send me my bill and any text messages in English, as well as have an English speaking representative on hand (or at least a callback from an English speaker) if I should ever call with inquiries. Unfortunately, that’s not going to get me the much-coveted iphone.
That’s what my friend was ranting and raving about as well: He wants to fly down to Hong Kong, buy iPhone and then get some kind of certificate from the Korea Communications Commission, and enroll his new bootleg iPhone on SK Telecom’s network. Then I guess he’ll triumphantly wave his iPhone in the face of the drone who turned him away, who will remember what she did to him and will be ashamed by having lost the company one customer. Ha! In your face, KT. In. Your. Face. Seems like a lot of work to make a point to people who are basically stone-deaf anyway.
Interesting Brendon. Last year KT was trying to cut off my phone since my employer was almost late renewing my visa and because their computer database was even slower. They cut off all 3G phones for foreigners without valid visas for fear that they’ll take the phone with them and run up international roaming charges. Several calls including some by Korean coworkers to try to prevent this inconvenience (which in the end was caused by the update delay of the gov’t database that KT checks to see when we shady foreigners’ visa’s expire) yielded no resolution. KT finally explained that they were simply following new laws, which sounded dubious. Anyway, it’s great being treated like an expected criminal by either the gov’t or the cellphone company to whom I’ve paid multiple 백만원 in the last few years.
A separate question… I’m guessing no, but will the Korean iphone be “activate-able” in the USA?
cmm — I have no idea whether the Korean iPhone is carrier locked or unlocked. Last year it was legal for the carriers to lock you in to their network, but KCC is trying to encourage carrier portability and so the policy goal is for all 3G phones to be portable simply by switching USIM cards. Whether that means you could carry it back to the US and enroll on a US 3G network is an interesting question.
Thanks Brendon.
You see, I’m just planning my midnight run, and being the criminal deviant I am, I’m obviously hoping to take KT for a ride along the way by taking the phone they subsidize for me back and activate it in The States. I’ll activate it of course only after I’ve first racked up and stuck KT with massive international roaming charges.
cmm — That sounds funny to you, but you might not be aware that AT&T in fact did get burned on tens of thousands (really more like hundreds of thousands, possibly a million or more) of 2.5G iPhones purchased in the United States and spirited off to China. So it’s not completely unreasonable for KT to fear the same phenomenon here in Korea, where the 3G phone is priced pretty well compared to China.
We just need KT to come up with a better way to protect their reasonable interests.
#33: Nice discrimination policy for their top market segment. I guess I won’t be giving up my Crackberry any time soon.
Possibly a million or more iPhones spirited off to China? This sounds interesting, but despite searching for awhile, I couldn’t find a good article about it on google–the results were heavy in news and commentary about the launch in China, tethering, and other things, despite my query. You don’t have a ready source, do you? Would like to read more about it.
cmmsomething like this? time to hon your googling skills
hon with an e
The one in Daejeon is easy to find: on the main drag down from Daejeon Station, right inside the “main” gate of Eunhaeng-dong, opposite the Starbucks.
chrome: google’s rss reader dropped into my bookmarks, igoogle as my home page with all my bookmarks -including rss feeeds, url address bar is my search bar, complete history and all bookmarks anywhere I go, one click from home page to my picasa, my gmail, my reader, my maps, my sites, all of the links I’ve created on my igoogle page, etc..by far the best system available.
“I’ve had one F-2 issued to me with 24 months once, but traditionally the visa is issued on a one-year term”
“Effectively means no foreign residents”
Time to switch to an F5 Brendan, or at least next time you renew….
“this policy of KT’s effectively means no foreign residents of Korea may purchase an iPhone”
Only when you conveniently forget to mention those on an F-5 visa.
@cm
“I wouldn’t mind running MAC as a virtual machine though, so that I can keep up.
Anyone know of a good program to run MAC on top of the PC?”
No, but there are two very good options for running windows on a mac. I use mac OS for most programs, but there are a couple I use -drafting software- that are PC only. I fire up Windows 7 through Parallels Desktop and run both at the same time with no switching. The windows programs look just like any other window. It runs well enough to do architectural renderings, so I imagine it would be good enough for about any task you wanted.
But seriously, maybe he DID know what it was but just not by the way you pronounced it. If you made it clear, maybe he would have been like: “아~~파이어팍스~~?!” As if YOU pronounced it incorrectly. By the way, what IS firefox?
Per Brendon
Yes, this may be true but there is nothing to stop anyone from going to a KT service center and telling them that they sat on one of their iphones after they took a shower and the phone got lodged in their anus and that they need a serviceman to reach in and pull it out. (Jerky Boys redux)
I did buy a Mac Pro Sunday and, thanks to Brendon’s post, went to the Frisbee place in Kangnam for parts too. It was easy.
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