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98.7% Internet Explorer in South Korea

September 29th, 2008 by Gen Kanai

Danny Kim at TechnoKimchi has new browser share numbers in South Korea. It’s pretty ugly.

IE: 98.66% Korean Browser Market Share

98.66% IE in Korea

If that is not a defacto monopoly (especially when you consider the market share that other browsers have elsewhere in the world), then I don’t know what is.

Background information on why S. Korea is an all-Microsoft, all-Internet Explorer nation is available on older posts on my blog including, the cost of monoculture, update on the cost of monoculture in Korea.

I hope to be able to write another update for 2008 before the end of this year. Whether I can be more positive than I have been in the past is yet to be determined.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Asia, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Korea, Microsoft, browser, open web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “98.7% Internet Explorer in South Korea”

  1. Jj Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 2:32 am

    Is is possible to know the share per version of IE?

  2. Jj Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 2:33 am

    Just checked the source, sorry about that.

  3. Ian Thomas (thelem) Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 5:57 am

    Do you have any historical figures? It wasn’t that long ago that we saw similar figures worldwide - http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/browser.php

    Is it now possible to view (m)any secure websites in a non-IE browser? If not, then until that happens I see little chance of IE losing significant market share.

  4. Gen Kanai Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 8:05 am

    Ian Thomas, afaik nothing has changed in S. Korea with respect to the requirement of both the SEED encryption algorithm and Active-X for secure transactions.

    There is an attempt to integrate SEED into NSS, but I personally am unclear as to the value of this work. SEED is only used in S. Korea. You need more than just SEED to make this work. You’re welcome to track that bug here:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453234

  5. Danny Kim Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    Thanks for the post. Part of the reason I wrote it up was to spread the news around the world so that we might be embarrased about it and finally wake up to amazing things that the rest of world is doing! :)

    Anyhow, yeah, I’m not so sure how long this will take till it gets fixed, if ever. I’m just afraid that b/c of problems like this one we might be constantly behind in the web world.

  6. slavka Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 2:33 am

    Below are the stats on my website(year 2008, visitors from Korea):
    1. Internet Explorer 342 71.70%
    2. Firefox 71 14.88%
    3. Opera 24 5.03% 1
    4. Chrome 17 3.56%
    5. Safari 16 3.35%

  7. subzey Says:
    January 15th, 2009 at 11:52 pm

    It’s just hell…

  8. Jesse Says:
    March 12th, 2009 at 9:28 am

    I am in korea right now- I think the reason is that korean web developers do not make their sites copatible with other browsers, especially Mozilla. I have been forced to use explorer for all sites that are korean.

  9. 아무래도 Says:
    March 14th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    역시 윈도우즈의 보급률 때문인것 같기도 하고 한국의 웹 들이
    너무 Active X에 치우쳐서 그런것같죠….. Opera나 chrome같은
    웹표준을 따르는 웹브라우져들이 많이 사용되었으면 하네요…

    ps.한국의 IE점유율이 세계 브라우져 점유율에 영향이 크답니다^^

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