About six months ago I went to a government auction site that required Internet Explorer. Yes, Internet Explorer. The site was active, too; the auction data was up-to-date. I added a user-agent extension in Chrome, switched to IE, retried and it worked; all functionality on the site was fine. So yeah, I was both sad and annoyed. My guess is this government office paid for a website 25 years ago and it hasn't been updated since.

In South Korea, ActiveX is still required for many things like banking and government stuff. So they're stuck with both IE and the gaping security hole in it that is ActiveX.

is this still true? I know this was the case in the past, but even in 2025?

Not really. You can access any Korean bank or government website using Chrome, and they actually recommend Chrome these days.

They still want to install a bunch of programs on your computer, though. It's more or less the same stuff that used to be written as ActiveX extensions, but rewritten using modern browser APIs. :(

Yeah it's probably an ancient web site. This was commonplace back in the day when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. Lazy web devs couldn't be bothered to support other browsers (or didn't know how) so just added a message demanding you use IE as opposed to fixing the problems with the site.

You may enter our site iff you use software we approve. Anything else will be seen as malicious. Papers please!

I, too, am saddened by this gatekeeping. IIUC custom browsers (or user-agent) from scratch will never work on cloudflare sites and the like until the UA has enough clout (money, users, etc) to sway them.

This was sadly always going to be the outcome of the Internet going commercial.

There's too much lost revenue in open things for companies to embrace fully open technology anymore.

It's kind of the opposite problem as well; huge well-funded companies bringing down open source project websites. See Xe's journey here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/

One may posit "maybe these projects should cache stuff so page loads aren't actually expensive" but these things are best-effort and not the core focus of these projects. You install some Git forge or Trac or something and it's Good Enough for your contributors to get work done. But you have to block the LLM bots because they ignore robots.txt and naively ask for the same expensive-to-render page over and over again.

The commercial impact is also not to be understated. I remember when I worked for a startup with a cloud service. It got talked about here, and suddenly every free-for-open-source CI provider IP range was signing up for free trials in a tight loop. These mechanical users had to be blocked. It made me sad, but we wanted people to use our product, not mine crypto ;)

>> Otherwise your users have to see a happy anime girl every time they solve a challenge. This is a feature.

I love that human, what a gem

Wait until you hear many antivirus/endpoint software block "recent" domain names from being loaded. According to them new domains are only used by evil people and should be blocked.