The response:

There are more than 1,600 government e-services online today, which were developed over the last six years. To ensure that these e-services are accessible by users using alternative browsers, the Government ministries and agencies have, as far as possible, avoid using browser-specific features in the development of their e-services. As a result, the majority of these services are accessible on a range of browsers.

However, it would neither be feasible nor cost-effective to mandate all these 1,600 e-services interoperate with all alternative browsers given the wide range of choices available. Instead, the Government ministries and agencies strive to ensure that e-services can be delivered to as wide a population as possible, by making sure that they work well with the most commonly used browser. Since 2002, Microsoft Internet Explorer has been and still is the most popular browser with more than two-thirds of the global market share.

We have noted an increase in the percentage of internet users using alternative browsers. We will continue to monitor this trend and ensure that Government e-services continue to be accessible by the vast majority of our users.

It is not only the Singapore government, but the Singapore web industry as a whole suffers from MSIE myopia. We have banking services that demand their customers use IE. Many web agencies design pages that break in “alternative” browsers. To say that the ministries and agencies have gone “as far as possible” in being browser-neutral might be a bit of a stretch, but in my experience it is hard to find local agencies who can tell you the inconsistencies between the rendering engines of IE and Firefox.

But reaching 2/3 of the population really isn’t good enough by any yardstick. And that’s based on browser usage stats as of 2002. I’m typing this on Firefox, and I’ve gotten most of my peers on Firefox. Personally, I think it’s time to stop monitoring and start moving towards a more semantic web.