So, the online tax-filing system of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) was reliant on Flash. Like many sites, they were left in the lurch when Adobe—and most browsers—stopped supporting it at the end of 2020.
So how did SARS prepare for this end-of-life moment for Flash? By rebuilding their online system so it works in native HTML?
Nope: They released their own browser, which still runs Flash. You can grab the "alternate SARS Browser solution" at their site here.
But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial.
Instead, the South African government agency decided to take one of the most mind-blowing decisions in the history of bad IT decisions and release its own web browser.
It has not been received well by tech folks in South Africa …
Granted, things aren't quite that bad, security-wise — the browser is set up to only access the SARS site. So you can't go wandering around unprotected in the chlamydian precincts of the Internet.
In a way, I'm almost impressed by what a loony bank-shot this is. I've downloaded a copy of it for posterity's sake.
