An excellent article in The Wall Street Journal today by Evan Ramstad. Entitled appropriately "At Last: A Push for Browser Diversity in Korea," it reports on the somewhat amazing effort by the Korean government to wean people off their heavy dependence upon Microsoft's IE6 browser and to encourage use of Firefox, Chrome and other browsers.
As the article notes,South Korea’s major Internet portals and government regulators are trying to pull the country’s Internet users into the 21st century. How? With a campaign to wean South Koreans off a decade-old Microsoft Corp. browser and some related security technology that is way out of date.
The campaign seeks to fix the essential contradiction in South Korea’s technology environment — the government in the late 1990s built amazing broadband infrastructure all over the country, but in 1999 imposed rules that locked users to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and an encryption method that made them vulnerable to hacking and software viruses.
I highly recommend that you read the entire article by Ramstad.
It's not clear to me whether this initiative includes making online government services accessible with non-IE browsers. There's no point the government telling Korean netizens to use other browsers and then only allowing them to submit taxes etc. using IE.
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