Swing Browser

» see swing-browser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Most browsers that only make sense in one country are held there by language. Swing Browser was held there by law. It was built for a web in which a South Korean who wanted to pay for something online, or file anything with a government office, had to be running a Microsoft component that Microsoft itself had already stopped caring about. On 2 April 2012 the Ministry of Public Administration and Security and the Korea Communications Commission went through the country's two hundred largest public and private sites and found 168 of them requiring ActiveX. Nothing in Turkish law ever told me which browser to open.

The browser came from Zum Internet, a subsidiary of ESTsoft, the company most Korean PC users knew for its file compression and its toolbar rather than for anything to do with the web. Mobile came first: there was an Android-only Swing site running by November 2012. The desktop version that people mean when they say Swing arrived on 4 December 2013, announced on the product's own notice board, with the press writing it up five days later.

It moved fast for about six months. Half a million monthly unique visitors by the end of December 2013, and seven hundred thousand by February. The highest audience figure anyone ever published for it was 704,656 monthly uniques for March 2014, measured by KoreanClick. The install counter ran at its own pace alongside that, a million at the hundred-day mark in March and 2.5 million by 26 June. Then the numbers stop. Nothing about Swing's size was published after June 2014, almost five years before the end, which makes the second half of its life a blank.

~ the case file ~

~ two engines and a list kept by hand ~

The mechanism was called 듀얼엔진, dual engine, and it was exactly that. 스피드모드 ran WebKit and would not touch ActiveX at all. 일반모드 ran Trident, Internet Explorer's engine, and in Zum's own words supported "ActiveX, and the security modules and payment modules the site provides". One window, and two completely different ideas inside it about what a web page is.

What makes it strange is that the switch was not yours. Which mode a given site opened in was decided by a per-site list that human beings at Zum Internet maintained, and if a site you used behaved badly in speed mode you filled in a form at /Support/Speedmode asking them to move it. There was also a floor under the whole thing that nobody advertised: Swing could not run unless Internet Explorer 7 or later was already installed on the machine, because the Trident half was borrowed from the host operating system rather than shipped in the download.

~ the law it was built against ~

Swing's own marketing page claimed that over 70 percent of Korean sites needed ActiveX, and that sentence sat there unedited for six years while the ground moved underneath it. In March 2014 the problem got a nickname, the Cheon Song-yi coat, after a garment from a television drama that overseas fans could not buy from Korean shopping sites because checkout wanted a certificate and a plug-in they had no way to obtain. Two months later the accredited-certificate requirement was dropped for card payments.

The thing itself took another six years to go. The rewritten Digital Signature Act came into force on 10 December 2020 and abolished the 공인인증서 after twenty-one years. Swing had stopped being supported twenty-three months before that, so the browser built to survive a mandate did not live to see the mandate end. It died ahead of its own cause.

~ the shutdown had a first step ~

Notice number 144 went up on 13 December 2018. What matters about it is the order. The first item was that requests to move a site into speed mode would no longer be accepted. Then came the dates: support ending on 7 January 2019, login on 31 March. The binary kept rendering pages for the twelve weeks in between, so for most of that window Swing worked and was simply no longer anybody's responsibility.

The exit instructions pointed users at 알툴바, ESTsoft's Internet Explorer-based toolbar, to retrieve their bookmarks and saved memos. The last version ever shipped was v4.24 on 5 March 2018, running Chromium 55, a number taken from Zum's own changelog rather than from Wikipedia, which says 59. The password manager had been pulled out of Swing that same day and the mobile version was switched off on 11 July 2018. No reason for any of it was ever published, and the Korean press that had covered the launch heavily covered the death not at all. The farewell page stayed up for about a year, last republished on 5 November 2019.

~ what outlasted the browser ~

Zum Internet listed on KOSDAQ through a SPAC merger on 23 May 2019, fifty-three days after the final login shutoff, and renamed itself ESTAiD in 2024. The executive who had been the public face of every Swing launch quote became ESTsoft's chief executive in 2016 and spent that year telling people the company's future was artificial intelligence. Zum went on to buy and eventually close other people's products, which is a separate story with its own stone in here.

Naver Whale is still running and is now the only domestic Korean PC browser left. It answered the same problem from the opposite direction, with no Trident anywhere in it, and that was the approach the law eventually rewarded. As for the address: swing-browser.com answers today with a Chinese adult video site behind Cloudflare, under a copyright line claiming 2019 to 2026. The real Swing files were served from mini.zumst.com, and altools.co.kr now contains zero occurrences of the word 스윙.

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