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  1. 2009/02/09 Using Mozilla Firefox in Korea (8)

Using Mozilla Firefox in Korea

Other | 2009/02/09 23:33 | Web 2.0 Asia

Note: The following is a guest post, contributed by Andrew Ace. a startup entrepreneur with expertise in social networking and viral marketing. For Andrew's full profile, see below. 

If you love technology then living in Korea is a wonderful thing.  Korea is one of the most connected countries in the world.  When someone thinks about Broadband Internet access and cell phone technologies Korea is usually one of the first countries to come to mind.  Broadband penetration in Korean households is over 90% while cell phone service and DMB (live TV) can be accessed anywhere in the country including in the subways.  These are things to really boast about.  In fact, personally I can’t recall anytime that I have ever had a cell phone call dropped which is a common occurrence in the US.

With all these marvels of technology that are in Korea there is still one piece of technology though that has been held back about a decade.  I’m talking of course about the Internet browser and the monopoly that Internet Explorer has on the Korean market.  There are very few websites that will even run correctly using any other type of browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.).  It’s almost ridiculous to think that a country that is about 2 or 3 years ahead of most other countries’ technology is still limiting their advancement in internet browsing.  

Being from the US I have enjoyed the use of Mozilla Firefox for some time now.  It runs much smoother than IE and since I am still running Windows XP and refuse to upgrade my operating system until a better form of Microsoft Windows 7 comes out my Internet Explorer runs at a snail’s pace.  I finally got so frustrated with IE today that I needed to do something.  I had even downloaded Google Chrome today just to see if that would work with some Korean websites, but with no avail.  

That’s why I am so happy that I was able to find this add-on. What this add-on does is it allows someone using Mozilla Firefox to open an Internet Explorer tab within the Firefox interface.  You can change back and forth between rendering engines and it has so far worked perfectly on many of the Korean websites that I have tried.  
Here are a few screenshots of how the add-on works.


1. Here we have logged onto a Korean website (tour.interpark.com).  As you can see the layout is a little off and the “select how many people” can’t be viewed properly.  



2. Now I will change the rendering engine to use Internet Explorer.  



3. Finally, the website is perfectly viewed within the Mozilla Firefox interface using the Internet Explorer add-on.  Notice there is an Internet Explorer icon next to the open tab. This tells you that you are now using an Internet Explorer tab.



You can easily switch back and forth between rendering agents and change different settings for the add-on.  I hope that this knowledge of the add-on helps people to enjoy a world beyond Internet Explorer.

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Andrew Ace is a Korean-American entrepreneur who graduated from Boston University in Finance and Law.  He has worked with a couple different US start-ups such as www.maestro.fm.  Andrew originally began his interest in technology start-ups when he founded Job’oozle, formerly www.joboozle.com (warning: joboozle.com is now a link farm), while he was in college with 5 other students at Harvard and Dartmouth.  His experience is in social networking and viral marketing techniques.  He is currently working on a new start-up in Korea.  


TAG Andrew Ace, , , Internet Explorer