Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by akamaka on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @07:20AM (#905212)

To be fair, Microsoft invested a lot more into catering for Korean users than anyone else.

Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's computer, and found out that he couldn't properly type Korean in his webmail program, while IE worked fine. You can guess what browser he decided to use.

That particular problem is fixed now, but the simple truth is that Microsoft got into the game way ahead of everyone else.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by patio11 on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @08:40AM (#905297)

This, this, a thousand times this.

Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by thingie on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @10:10AM (#905420)

We had a delivery from xkcd store delayed by one month because of few characters with diacritics, which the xkcd store software couldn't handle, and the package was sent back as undeliverable because of the unreadable address. And that was latin script, with just few diacritic marks (mostly just ASCII), I can't imagine what would happen with some non-alphabetic script…

And that is far too common. On the other hand, modern desktop software (either OSS and MS) is, thankfully, quite OK, nowadays.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by robin_reala on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @09:35AM (#905374)

Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on localisation.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by quant18 on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @11:25AM (#905539)

IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others:

1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour

2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout

Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc.

http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Korea's Internet Is Mired in a Microsoft Monoculture by metalkpretty on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @11:39AM (#905570)

I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.

[ Parent | on HN ]