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Comment by weka | Hacker News Reader

At some point, the government is going to have to realize that the internet has long passed the days of moving slow.

Putting unrealistic restrictions (only works in IE, can only use .Net) is going to hinder the progress of its development.

There are times where vetting and change management make sense. But then we have applications that were built before 2008 and realize that in the long run, with the tools of today, it would be easier to use the tools of today than adding another feature to this bloated mess.

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That is unrealistic (I work for gov ATM). There is no such thing as incentive in gov, stuff is mandated by low. You don't want to use IE ? Your problem, you can explain it to the judge. That is how majority of gov services work (not only IE, multiple domains).

We had services from ALL major IT companies in the world that still need IE (or Firefox, or Chrome, exclusively) , so this is even not strictly in gov or IE domain only.

Some gov companies are lucky to have somebody that lives in 21st century that is on such position that can change some of it but that is merely a fluke.

I would be also interested in what country it is.

We had similar case - few years ago, the tax office switched to electronic VAT tax returns, which was Windows-only. There was a company that continued to fill their returns using the old-fasioned way (paper). In the court, they won, because the filing system was Windows-only, and the state cannot force you to purchase your software from a specific supplier.

Serbia.

Perhaps you can win on court. But what about time and energy you will lose. Nobody wants that. They got sued, thats what I am talking about.

Sure, they certainly had some dreamless nights, but I'm glad they stood by their principles. We are all benefiting. Since then, all state-financed projects have to be accessible cross-platform, using open formats and protocols.

Yeah, no reason to do otherwise, even if there are 10 users IMO.

And according to my Kibana presentation on IIS logs there are actually ~100 linux users in entire country (not counting mobile users on Linux of which there are a lot due to Android). This might be related to concrete gov domain (accounting and VAT) tho.

Its principles 100% for me.

Out of interest, which country are you referring to here? GDS in the UK fully support Chrome, Safari, IE and Firefox [1].

[1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/11/what-devices-are-we-suppo...

Gov.UK is not really representative. Its outlier.

I was at their Velocity conf presentation and immediately took them as show case on how gov stuff should be done.

I'm working under the GOV.UK umbrella at the moment. The browser compatibility is mainly achieved by using JavaScript very sparingly and trying not to deviate from the Design System[0]. Accessibility is really important and we can't take sites/apps 'live' without undergoing a full assessment.

[0] https://design-system.service.gov.uk

Something like that might be a solution for UI limited sites such as GOV.UK (the reason why I like it, gov sites should look like that, be clean, informative and no distractions).

We use Vue.js for frontends so 'using JavaScript very sparingly' doesn't even compute to me. Switched from Angular and I totally understand what you mean (given its more JS hardcore and more problems).

Yeah, we've got more than enough history to look at to draw conclusions from re: "web" and "internet" software/services.

Any new projects should have a "migration" or "upgrade" metric associated - how long will it take to upgrade to the next major version of the employed platform? how long will it take to migrate to a different platform? no doubt there are not always simple answers, but it's something which needs to at least be considered. And there are sometimes really "single source" options with no viable competition, but those are possibly more rare than we'd think, and even if not, the risk needs to be called out even more in those project/contracts then.

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