Following on from my posting this week on Google's new Chrome browser   I see there's a huge argument about to kickoff over COI proposals regarding which browsers the public sector should support. You may be forced to change your browsing habits and computer setup to accommodate the guidelines if they were to be accepted

The Central Office of Information quietly published its consultation document on Friday, containing a proposal that public sector websites may snub browsers with a low market share. The COI suggests that web designers need not test against browsers with a share of less than two per cent. The bureaucrats recommend that designers place an advisory notice asking users to switch to a "supported" browser.

It's not the arbitrary figure, apparently plucked out of the air, that has enraged professionals - but the entire approach. The Web Standards Project's Bruce Lawson called it "entirely back-to-front", arguing that designers should code for the web, not individual browsers. Designers should conform to commonly agreed basic standards, rather than browser idiosyncrasies he said.

"The guidelines should be advocating a specific development methodology: they should recommend designing to Web Standards," he wrote. "Costs will be driven down, even if testing is performed across more browsers, because there will be fewer inconsistencies and less recoding to fix inconsistencies."

The guidelines recommend that browsers with less than two per cent share, which leaves Opera, and other browsers in the cold, should be disregarded.

Rather unsurprisingly Opera is apparently canvassing the COI to adopt a Code to Standards alternative.

Oddly, the bureaucrats fails to follow their own logic, with the requirement that Linux should be supported - even though it "fails" the two per cent test. The most popular browser on Linux, Firefox, amassed just 153 visits to the COI site in July, compared to 19,777 from Internet Explorer.

(By the same COI figures, IE accounted for 83.25 per cent of traffic, followed by Firefox on Windows with 8.68 per cent, Safari with 3.99 per cent, and Firefox for Mac with 2.53 per cent.)

And it's particularly harsh on Opera, which not only fails the concession granted to Linux, as its popularity is underestimated because Opera can masquerade as "Internet Explorer" or "Firefox" so web server logs fail to reflect its true usage.