I’ve also wrote a comment on the context of how these ugly programs got adopted on [0].
To quote myself…
> Everybody knows that the systems are absurd. This is basically a countrywide legacy that we’re figuring our way out for ~30yrs.
> When the idea was first proposed, it was when IE didn’t have a yes/no dialog to ask whether to load native code or not.
> When IE first added ActiveX confirmation dialogs, banks instructed customers to press yes. When IE deprecated ActiveX, banks didn’t remove their 20-yr old code straight away; people were advised to turn on ActiveX support from advanced settings (they added step-by-step instructions to help people). When MS finally ripped out ActiveX, banks copied their ActiveX components into a separate executable that runs a localhost server.
I’m sure that if it wasn’t iPhones, South Korea would have been locked into this legacy for a lot longer. (In fact, we once had versions of these programs for Android as well! iOS didn’t allow this (thankfully).)
To quote myself…
> Everybody knows that the systems are absurd. This is basically a countrywide legacy that we’re figuring our way out for ~30yrs.
> When the idea was first proposed, it was when IE didn’t have a yes/no dialog to ask whether to load native code or not.
> When IE first added ActiveX confirmation dialogs, banks instructed customers to press yes. When IE deprecated ActiveX, banks didn’t remove their 20-yr old code straight away; people were advised to turn on ActiveX support from advanced settings (they added step-by-step instructions to help people). When MS finally ripped out ActiveX, banks copied their ActiveX components into a separate executable that runs a localhost server.
I’m sure that if it wasn’t iPhones, South Korea would have been locked into this legacy for a lot longer. (In fact, we once had versions of these programs for Android as well! iOS didn’t allow this (thankfully).)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34313137