“Kogan is slapping a 6.8 percent tax on customers accessing the company’s website on the Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser,” Stephanie McDonald reports for Computerworld.
“The world first tax will be applied to all products on the Kogan.com website when accessed through IE7,” McDonald reports. “‘Internet Explorer 7 has long since passed its use-by date. It’s a constant source of frustration for our web guys and we’re sick of burning cash on a browser that hit the market nearly six years ago. It goes against everything Kogan stands for,’ said Ruslan Kogan, Kogan founder and CEO, in a statement. ‘It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence and costing the internet economy millions of dollars.'”
McDonald reports, “Customers can avoid the tax by using other non-Internet Explorer browsers, such as Chrome, Mozilla, Safari and Opera. ‘We don’t believe our customers are to blame for Internet Explorer 7, so we have included a popup on the site which encourages them to avoid the tax by simply upgrading their browser,’ Kogan said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bravo, Kogan! Every online retailer should follow suit immediately!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James Wigg” for the heads up.]
Dang… what a perfect idea! An “obsolete browser support tax” would be an excellent way of getting people to realize they need to upgrade to a current browser.
I wonder what they are charging the living fossils still using IE6?
And why only 6.8%?
This is way cool! Hey, how about a Flash tax too?
Not such a bad idea! 🙂
extremely good idea!
+10 for the flash tax! 😀
Lol!
Wait….
LOL!
I needed a good laugh tonight, thanks MDN.
This will get way out of hand way quick… what happens when Amazon sticks on an iPad tax because it costs them extra to make a mobile site? You see where this is going…
1. iPad needs no mobile site crutch.
2. iPad handles all modern web standards.
3. If you had to slap special exceptions code to get your website to run properly in IE because Windows users are a bunch of Luddite, legacy-loving anchors on Internet advancement you would known how off-base your comment is.
1st of all, I HATE it when sites push iPads to a mobile site. The iPad was designed to handle the full web.
i second that…
And no way to disable it either, except use a 3rd party browser. Defeats the purpose.
Missing the point… iPad was just a quick example. It’s gonna suck if companies start slapping on idiotic taxes for stupid reasons. It would take their “developers” 10 seconds to code an exception that excludes ie7 altogether and puts a note up that says “use a different browser”. Instead, they’re taxing, and worse, shaming their customers. Not good business. If this becomes common, we’re all gonna regret it when someone doesn’t like whatever browser we’re using and they have the only one of whatever it is we want to buy.
This in NO WAY is a comment on the crap that MS foists on it’s public btw. IE7 should be dead and buried. I’m just saying this is a terrible way to treat customers, and has the potential to get out of hand very quickly.
5 seconds to code for IE7… are you serious?
without IE my home page is 50lines or less. To support IE, it’s now 135 lines. Go figure
Read the post. 10 seconds to code a “we don’t support IE7 page”. I said nothing about supporting IE7.
As much as I dislike IE/MS as all of you, I bet you would be posting hateful comments if the tax were on old versions of Safari or Firefox. There are people out there (not me) who maintain older OS’s and cannot upgrade their browsers.
Who do they think they are? Airlines with their baggage fees, more-legroom fees, blanket fees, bag-of-peanut fees
You know what they say: “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
You can always take your business elsewhere.
I don’t code of IE 7 or older. I used to worry about my sites being access by everybody. Think about it. If your doing business, do you really want to do business with some cheapskate that is using IE7 because he does not want to buy a new system? What kind of business do you expect to do with such character?
People don’t have to buy a new system to avoid the tax. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE8 can each be downloaded for free from any computer with IE7. This tax just gives people an incentive to upgrade, who otherwise would be too oblivious or lazy to bother.
This is the most ballsy statement I’ve heard from a CEO since Steve’s passing. Says a lot about the state Microsoft when major companies basically say “F you, and the plague you rode in on.”
I LOVE THIS!!!!!
Shoulda made it round 7%.” IE 7, we tax your patience and your purchase”.
If we followed your logic, wouldn’t IE6 users have to pay less, and IE10 users would have to pay more? Also, 7 isn’t a round number.
It was an off hand comment, I didn’t do research.
LOL. I’m trying to imagine now what type of research you might be talking about. Checking the Wikipedia page for Round Numbers to see if 7 is on it? Finding a Sesame Street episode where the Count explains what numbers come before and after 7? Doing a few hands-on experiments using your fingers to represent the numbers 1-10?
I’m sorry, I’ll leave you alone now.
Internet Explorer was pure evil. MS effed up everything with IE 4 in an attempt to screw Netscape. In the process, every web developer and every MS customer got screwed. The problem festered for years before MS finally came around and realized that they needed to correctly support web standards. The path to recovery was slow and painful and we’re sill feeling the pain.
What really gets my goat are web applications that *require* IE to work. Big software houses (e.g. SAP) are guilty of this. This is BS. How does a top-tier company like that get away with rinky-dink software that can’t run without IE?
As someone who does web dev, I hate IE with a burning passion, but Netscape screwed themselves over pretty well themselves. Netscape’s browser and their multifunction “Communicator” became a bloated mess that crashed often and didn’t support the emerging technologies of the time. IE was quick by comparison and at least made the effort, even though it screwed up the industry for the next decade.
Just to weigh in here, IE6 was, when released, an awesome and ahead of its time browser, that pushed the web forward. Of course, MS got lazy after achieving the browser monopoly, and let IE6 languish while the rest of the web moved forward.
IE7 and IE8, on the other hand, are just utter crap, and have never been better than crap. They were outdated BEFORE they were release. Microsoft actually had the nerve to release a web browser in 2009 that couldn’t automatically round corners.
I don’t remember a time when Netscape was ever that awesome. I think they were at their best after Firefox splintered off from them, then Netscape returned as a Firefox clone with a stylish Netscape skin.
Kogan’s Australia’s richest man under 30 yo and so doesn’t need to pander to users of heritage junk like IE7. He’s famously outspoken here against net censorship as well.
Now let’s get the US government to drop IE7.
So when will MDN block access to their site from IE?
one problem, related to this, is that the MDN mobile version crashes regularly on just the iPods I call my own.
– doing OK on iPhone and fine on iPad.
why is that, actually? some embedded MS code or advertising code strings?
chairs will be thrown at MS !
That’s a new take on the old “windows tax”!
I like it!
Its 6.8% because…
.1% for every month Ie7 has been released…
According to Kogan.
That should be a tax on all PC users.
It’s true! Here’s the start of the message that you get when you try to check out using IE7 (or IE9 in IE7 developer mode…) explaining why there’s a big difference between the listed price and your total due: “It appears you or your system administrator has been in a coma for over 5 years and you are still using IE7.” There’s also a “Department of Internet Justice Tax Notice” badge on the message. Hysterical.
Freedonia’s Secretary of War: How about taking up the tax?
Rufus T. Firefly: How ’bout taking up the carpet?
Freedonia’s Secretary of War: I still insist we must take up the tax.
Rufus T. Firefly: He’s right, you’ve gotta take up the tacks before you can take up the carpet.
–Marx Bros., “Duck Soup” (1933)