Same in China. All major banks require IE (6 in most cases. though 8 works most of the time), in addition to some stupid security USB keys that you have to insert into your machine to prove it's really you. Oh, of coz the drivers only works in Windows. Even Windows in virtual machines sometimes have trouble with these devices. You have to use a native Windows.

Another reason is the proliferation of pirated copies of Windows.

Life is extremely hard for Linux users. Less so for OS X, but occasionally you still need to dual boot.

Also, almost all of the korean free-to-play MMORPGs require IE to launch them from.

It must have been a very compelling dog and pony show that Microsoft put on to get ActiveX mandated by law in South Korea.

Actually, it's because the Clinton administration made encryption protocols a type of munition, and didn't allow the export of any with more than 40 bits until 1999. OTOH, South Korean legislation didn't allow the use of 40 bit encryption for online transactions, so they commissioned the Korean Information Security Agency to create a 128 bit block cypher called SEED in 1998. At that time, ActiveX (IE) and NSPlugin (Netscape) were the only viable technologies for this purpose that would be available on all customers' computers. Now that Netscape's dead, only ActiveX is left.

In January 1999, RFC 2246 (128 bit SSL) was finalized and permitted for export, but by then SEED was already entrenched. It's only now that smartphones are starting to become popular that they're trying to change things: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2010/09/133_73601....

You can read Gen Kanai's post about it on the Mozilla Asia blog for more info: http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monocultu...

What if someone revived the NSPlugin and/or implemented SEED for Chrome and Firefox?

Firefox already has SEED for TLS in the crypto library we use (NSS). AFAICT, the problem now is mostly getting bank websites to change. I believe some Korean banks have indicated that they will start supporting the standard mechanism in addition to the ActiveX control.

People from Mozilla China have recently pointed out to me the crypto-related issues in China. My understanding is that you can make Firefox do what you need for Chinese banking but it requires unintuitive configuration and/or hard-to-get drivers. I am hoping that sometime this year we will make improvements to make smartcards plug-and-play on platforms (like Windows) that support it. This will be a nice benefit not only for Chinese users, but also for any other smartcard users.

Significant changes have probably been made to the implementation since the NSPlugin implementation was dropped; the protocol may have become dependent on ActiveX-specific features/settings.

I don't know enough of the technical details to fully follow the discussion, but it looks like support might have been added to Firefox ("Status: RESOLVED FIXED"): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839

This commit definitely makes it look like something has happened: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/653b75a8f4...

Thanks for this, I had no idea. Do you have any more information about this, or links?