Slightly ajar

We've been very active recently in finding issues on Korean web sites, and reporting these to the site authors. Korea is a quite unique market in that they have very advanced devices and one of the highest take up rates of broadband internet access in the world, yet Internet Explorer has a huge market share in Korea, so almost every site I've tested is designed and tested for IE and Windows only, without use of web standards. This causes big problems for every other browser and platform, including Firefox, Safari and ourselves. Some issues are bigger with no easy solution such as the use of Active X, but the majority are due to making use of quirks and bugs in IE and often only need to change one word to make them work in all major browsers. Many of these issues can be found in my previous post on common web site issues.

We'd like to do all we can to fix these issues and promote web standards, enabling Korean sites to work on any device, any platform and any browser. Users should be free to make their own choices on how they access the web. To help our push in this area we are extending Open the Web's efforts into Korea. Opera's team in Korea is growing as we speak, and Irene has recently been hired with part of her responsibility to work with myself and the rest of the team on Opening Korea. I'd like to wish her welcome, and look forward to seeing cross browser development take off. If you are Korean and can't access you're favourite sites, feel free to contact me and I'll make sure the issues get looked into.