SEOUL — In South Korea, one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, there are few limits to what you can easily do online unless you use the wrong web browser.
As a business customer of one of the country’s largest foreign banks, you cannot make business payments online in Google Chrome. If you use Apple’s Safari, you cannot apply for artist funding through the National Culture and Arts website. And if you own a childcare facility, it is not possible to register your organization on the Ministry of Health and Welfare website in Mozilla’s Firefox.
In all these cases, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, or a similar alternative, is the required browser.
When Microsoft shut down Internet Explorer or IE on June 15, the company said it would redirect users to its newer Edge browser in the coming months. The announcement inspired jokes and memes commemorating the internet of yesteryear. But in South Korea, IE is not an online artifact. The defunct browser is still needed for a small number of crucial banking and government-related tasks that many people can’t live without.
South Korea’s allegiance to Internet Explorer, 27 years after its introduction and now retired, bears witness to a good dose of irony: a country known for blazing-fast broadband and innovative devices is tethered to an insecure and insecure piece of software run by the largest part of the world has been left behind long ago.
Most South Korean websites work in any browser, including Google Chrome, which accounts for about 54 percent of the country’s Internet usage. Internet Explorer is less than 1 percent, according to Statcounter. And yet, following Microsoft’s announcement, there was a last minute struggle between some essential sites to prepare for life after IE.
The South Korean branch of British bank Standard Chartered warned corporate customers in May that they must start using the Edge browser in “IE mode” to access the Internet banking platform “Straight2Bank”. Several Korean government websites told users that some services would likely be disrupted if they didn’t switch to Edge.
In May, Naver, one of Korea’s largest Internet companies, highlighted a feature of its Whale browser that allows access to sites that required Internet Explorer. Kim Hyo, head of Naver’s Whale team, said the company originally added the option in 2016. He thought it would no longer be necessary for Microsoft to shut down IE.
But as the final days approached, Mr. Kim realized that some Korean websites would not make the switch in time, so he kept the feature and changed the name to “Internet Explorer Mode.” Modernizing websites that had been intended for IE for decades was “a pretty big task,” he said, with some sites “just meeting the deadline.”
South Korea’s reliance on Internet Explorer dates back to the 1990s, when the country became a frontrunner in using the Internet for banking and shopping. To protect online transactions, the government passed a law in 1999 requiring encrypted digital certificates for all things that previously required a person’s signature.
To verify a person’s identity, additional software connected to the browser, a so-called plug-in, was required. The South Korean government has authorized five companies to issue such digital certificates using a Microsoft plugin called ActiveX. But the plug-in only worked in Internet Explorer.
At the time, using a Microsoft plugin seemed like an obvious choice. Microsoft Windows software dominated the PC market in the 1990s and Internet Explorer had exploited that position to become the dominant browser. As major Korean websites required IE, other websites began targeting Microsoft’s browser, further enhancing its importance. According to one estimate, Internet Explorer had a 99 percent market share in Korea between 2004 and 2009.
“We were really the only game in town,” said James Kim, who led Microsoft in South Korea from 2009 to 2015. Kim, who is now head of the US Chamber of Commerce in Seoul, said Microsoft wasn’t trying to compete, but many things “didn’t work” without IE.
Kim Keechang, a law professor at Korea University in Seoul, said Internet Explorer’s stranglehold on South Korea in the early 2000s was so complete that most South Koreans “couldn’t name another browser.”
When Mr. Kim returned to South Korea in 2002 after teaching abroad, he found that he couldn’t do anything online with his computer running Linux, a free, open-source alternative to Windows and Firefox. Every year he went to an internet cafe to access a computer with IP to file his taxes on a government site.
In 2007, Mr. Kim filed a lawsuit against the Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute, one of five government-approved private companies designated to issue digital certificates. He argued that the company, which issued about 80 percent of South Korean certificates, had unfairly discriminated against him by not allowing other browsers.
Over a period of three years, Mr. Kim lost the case, lost the appeal and lost in the country’s Supreme Court. But his lawsuit drew wider attention to the pitfalls of South Korea’s system, especially after a 2009 cyberattack misused ActiveX to spread malware on Korean computers.
With the advent of smartphones, an industry built on software from Apple and Google, South Korea, like much of the world, began to reduce its reliance on Microsoft. In 2010, the country issued guidelines requiring government websites to be compatible with three different web browsers. But changing the conduits of the Internet in South Korea was not easy, especially as banks and credit card companies supported the existing system.
As public opinion changed, users began to get annoyed at the inconvenience of having to use ActiveX to buy things online. Critics argued that the technology had failed to fulfill its purpose because the plug-in software had actually made users less secure.
Microsoft introduced Edge in 2015 as a replacement for Internet Explorer, and the company said it didn’t support ActiveX in the new browser. Chrome became the best browser in the country three years earlier.
In 2020, South Korea amended the 1999 law to eliminate the need for digital certificates, a move that appeared to close the book on ActiveX and Internet Explorer. That same year, Microsoft began removing support for IE from some of its online services. A year later, the company announced its intention to end Internet Explorer altogether.
While much of the world was joking about the demise of Internet Explorer, a South Korean engineer marked the occasion in a more bleak way.
Jung Ki-young, a 39-year-old software developer, placed a tombstone for IE on the roof of his older brother’s cafe in Gyeongju, a city on Korea’s southeast coast, about 170 miles from Seoul. He paid $330 for the monument, which was engraved with the browser’s recognizable “e” logo and an inscription: “It was a good resource for downloading other browsers.”
Mr. Jung said he had quite a few frustrations with Internet Explorer, but he felt that the browser that had introduced so many South Koreans to the web deserved a worthy goodbye. “Using Internet Explorer was difficult and frustrating, but it also served a good purpose,” said Mr. Jung. “I don’t feel right about just retiring it with a ‘we don’t need you anymore’ attitude.”
