Article
E-Government-Offensive im Microsoft-Browser | news.ORF.at (Austria – German language)
My comments and brief interpretation
Judging from my basic understanding of the German language together with use of Google’s machine translation, I had “got the gist” of this situation which would be considered hostile to the European Commission’s agenda concerning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.
What I was reading here was that the federal government in Austria were placing heavy emphasis on Internet Explorer 8 as part of their “e-government” initiative. This was including a downloadable toolbar add-in amongst obvious page-optimisation for this browser.
Most likely, I would suspect that, like most large organisations, the Austrian government uses Internet Explorer 8 as part of their standard operating environment and they expect that most users in that country may have stuck with IE8 even during the “Browser Choice Screen” switchover. One could say that this government could get away with this practice because many public and private organisations supply iPhone client apps to make their “front-end” useable on an iPhone which may be platform-specific.
What I would like to see with this is that if the government sites become less useful or unable to fulfil their function because of the preference for a particular browser is concerned, then the sites should be organised to at least fulfil their function no matter the desktop-computer user agent.
I just finished a book on government web sites and that led to some web 2.0 research questions regarding civic engagement and the relationships between citizens and all levels of government:
1. How has Web 2.0 changed relationships?
2. What are the affects of the changes in relationships caused by Web 2.0?
3. Have Web 2.0 effects been beneficial?
If you are interested in contributing to a book that looks at these questions please see the call for chapters at: http://www.igi-global.com/AuthorsEditors/AuthorEditorResources/CallForBookChapters/CallForChapterDetails.aspx?CallForContentId=83a379cb-7965-453b-8b6c-8210bfcda664