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Councilman Green to City: Internet Explorer only? Really?
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Councilman Green to City: Internet Explorer only? Really?
Councilman Bill Green introduced a bill in City Council today that would require all city websites and web applications to be compatible with various Internet browsers.
Currently, some functions on the city's website are accessible only using Internet Explorer — including "Econtracts" the online destination for those who seek to do business with the city, and the Department of Revenue's online system for payment of business income tax.
According to this site here, Internet Explorer is the world's third-most popular (and, weirdly, third-most-unpopular) browser, used to explore the Internet only about 16% of the time (a five percent drop since last year), coming in third behind Firefox (33%) and Chrome (44%).
Green's bill would make the city make these sites accessible to the other (more popular) browsers.
"I had a number of small business people who were using Apple and having problems," Green told CP today, saying one bunch of would-be contractors "had to go next door and use a [PC] computer ... it just didn't make sense."
"In my experience," he added, "the quickest way to make the city move on stuff is to introduce a piece of legislation, so I did ... The whole purpose of going to the web is convenience. So it doesn't make sense for us not to have standards that ever other city and corporation in the country do."
Indeed, the language of Green's bill points out that other cities, like Boston, Washington D.C., New York, and San Francisco "optimize their websites and online functions for use with a variety of popular, widely-available Internet browsers," but that "websites for certain City of Philadelphia departments function on only one Internet browser, Internet Explorer."
Lewis Rosman, legislative director for Mayor Michael Nutter, said today that the bill is still being reviewed.
In the interest of fairness, and in anticipation of perhaps a little ribbing of the city on the part of local media, this reporter would like to point out that certain Philadelphia news organizations — in particular, those owned by or in partnership with the Philadelphia Media Network (including City Paper) — use a content management system called "Clickability," which, though browser-based, supports only … Internet Explorer or Firefox.
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