It looks like classic vendor lock-in. Some bank starts requiring ActiveX to log in at a time when IE had over 90% of the marketshare, soon all banks require it, and all Koreans that wanted to use an internet bank switched to IE because that was easiest.

And then everyone else designing web services in Korea knows that since everyone uses IE, they don't bother optimizing or even testing their web sites in anything but IE.

So when Firefox appears on the market, none of the bank websites work, and plenty of regular websites don't work or look like shit in it, so users never bother with it. It's a negative spiral.

Contrast that with the development in Sweden where I am: I switched banks in 1999 to one with a really good internet bank that used standard client certificates. It worked in all browsers on all platforms. Some other banks had mediocre internet services, some had services that required the users to install something proprietary windows-only, and some banks used a hardware authenticator. The ones with bad compatibility, the ones that didn't work on Mac or in Netscape got a lot of flak from consumers, and the ones with compatibility won all the awards and got a lot of good press and goodwill.

That was instead a positive spiral, and today the technologies that survived are standard client certificates or hardware authenticators, and it doesn't matter with OS you're running or which browser you're using, all internet banks here are usable by everyone.