When you mention it, as a Linux user at the time I struggled a lot with the ActiveX thing… Eventually I think I gave up.
I had no idea that stuff was government-mandated.
It was government mandated but it was an attempt by their government to strengthen security at the time when they couldn't import stronger crypto. Then it became established and hard to remove.
>Due to restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States, standard 128-bit SSL encryption was unavailable in Korea. Web browsers were only available to Koreans with weakened 40-bit encryption. In the late 1990s, the Korea Internet & Security Agency developed its own 128-bit symmetric block cipher named SEED and used ActiveX to mount it in web browsers. This soon became a domestic standard, and the country's Financial Supervisory Service used the technology as a security screening standard. ActiveX spread rapidly in Korea. In 2000, export restrictions were lifted, allowing the use of full-strength SSL anywhere in the world. Most web browsers and national e-commerce systems adopted this technology, while Korea continued to use SEED and ActiveX.
I heard Korea had a problematic mandatory Internet login wall specifically built for IE with ActiveX on XP, and that that made use of Linux and/or Firefox complicated.
Funnily it lead to creation of PC F2P gaming culture too for some reason.
Running IE in wine wasn't always the easiest thing in the world, and when you were specifically running it to try and use weird integrations even less so.
