The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.

In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.

I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions .  I think is the correct way.

For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.

It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!

UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr

The maximum technical-related aspiration of the people is living in an apartment fully stock of all kind of gadgets like automatic doors, automatic lights, voice controled washing machines, internet conected fridges and huge flat televisions.

Korean Internet Connection

Korean Internet penetration is probably the largest of all countries. 60% of families enjoy internet conection in their homes and 87% of them (compare that with US 19%) is using broadband.

Broadband is some form of high speed internet, for example a high speed and high quality fibre line, ADSL line, cable or mobile internet. In my case we are paying around 30K wons (20 EUR) for an ADSL line but in general, DSL lines are falling steadily and FFT (fiber to the home) is growing

Cell technology

Korea had made a huge investment in CDMA technology, which was great at that time but a real problem now that all providers are switching to GSM. Korean cells are a bit old-fashioned to my eyes because I’m used to see the last mobile gadgets in Spain. In Korea there are not Iphones (Iphones are GSM) but there are also cells with huge touch screens althouth nobody seems to have one (Maybe they are too high end, maybe having a huge touch screen is not atractive to Koreans)

All modern cells support Digital TV, and Koreans use it as entertainment while conmutting to work or school in bus and subway where by the way there is perfect voice and data service.

Mobile internet

Korea is leader regarding mobile internet. They made their own cool technology (Wibro) to prevent korean companies from paying royalties to american/european ones. Wibro has been a huge success and now it’s part of the Wimax specification: Mobile Wimax = Wibro.

Wibro is based on CDMA designs and for that reason I think Koreans are going to jump over the 3G cell technology and use 4G directly. Actually they are now already using 4G with Wibro, which must be popular because it’s so cheap. Wibro cost around 20K wons per month (13,5 EUR) for a reliable ubiquitous wireless internet connectivity. I’m pretty sure Wibro works way better than our UMTS-based HSPDA wireless connection back in Spain.

Operative systems

Korea is Microsoft’s best client. I’ve seen Ipods but almost no Apple computers. Furthermore there is no Linux presence.

Korean websites usually only work with Explorer and frecuently they need to install plugins in the form of special ActiveX controls so if you are living in Korea you need to use Windows or a least have a Windows computer close to you.

¿What are the reasons for this love? Having a uniform environment helped the country to reach a incredible technological level faster. Nowadays it seems they have a huge problem because it’s a very bad experience to use a korean computer: korean Windows computers tend to have lots and lots of crappy extra software installed that makes computers slow to a crawl.

There are also other problems, for example I would like to use a USB Wibro dongle so I can have internet conection everywhere, but It doesn’t work on linux so I’m not going to apply for the service.