World's first 'tax' on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 [BBC]

Basq

Was gonna post this in Cools Vids & Pics & Links.. but thought it'd be more appreciated here!

Now THIS is a good news story!

The Australian online retailer Kogan.com has introduced the world's first "tax" on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser.

Customers who use IE7 will have to pay an extra surcharge on online purchases made through the firm's site.

..

Mr Kogan said it was unlikely that anyone would actually pay the charges. His goal is to encourage users to download a more up-to-date version of Internet Explorer or a different browser.

smash

I was going to post it yesterday but didn't know where to post it. Here or in one of the marketing sections because it's really just a PR exercise.

Mister Man

Seen this yesterday! Although I'm all for posting a message when someone comes onto a site with IE, I wouldn't agree with charging them more for it. Some people just don't understand why IE is bad, which is fine with me.

It's a great stunt for the website, it's turned into somewhat of a big story over the last 24 hours. I'm sure whoever thought of it is delighted with himself now though!

S.M.B.

Mister Man wrote: »

Seen this yesterday! Although I'm all for posting a message when someone comes onto a site with IE, I wouldn't agree with charging them more for it. Some people just don't understand why IE is bad, which is fine with me.

It's a great stunt for the website, it's turned into somewhat of a big story over the last 24 hours. I'm sure whoever thought of it is delighted with himself now though!

Well they don't actually expect anybody to pay the additional tax. One would be more likely to upgrade/change browser than pay what could be a sizable amount of money.

It may be a great marketing stunt but it's also a solid enough business decision too.

Mister Man

I wouldn't put it past some clueless user actually paying for it!

Feathers

S.M.B. wrote: »

Well they don't actually expect anybody to pay the additional tax. One would be more likely to upgrade/change browser than pay what could be a sizable amount of money.

It may be a great marketing stunt but it's also a solid enough business decision too.

& what about the people who are on a work machine locked down to IE, who decide not to bother with your site & buy the stuff elsewhere?

desaparecidos

Feathers wrote: »

& what about the people who are on a work machine locked down to IE, who decide not to bother with your site & buy the stuff elsewhere?

+1. Lots of all large corporations (where the cogs turn slow) will have a policy of IE only (IE6 and IE7 mostly).

I might understand an IE6 tax, but IE7 isn't THAT bad. If you do things right then it will be a case of some CSS tweaks here and there to make things pixel perfect for IE7 and everything else.

Giblet

Taxing people for developer incompetence

Freddio

Fair play, when you consider that if something is good enough for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, and then you have to go and code separate css for IE6/7 and separate css yet again for IE8/9

I would also generally find that organizations that do not allow you to upgrade your browser, won't allow shopping or social sites through the firewall.

Feathers

Freddio wrote: »

Fair play, when you consider that if something is good enough for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, and then you have to go and code separate css for IE6/7 and separate css yet again for IE8/9

Why not just drop support for IE 6/7?

Freddio

Feathers wrote: »

Why not just drop support for IE 6/7?

I do :-)

Eoin

I know this is just a PR stunt etc, but I don't like the way it's done. I think it's completely condescending.

Giblet wrote: »

Taxing people for developer incompetence

As I said in the thread in AH, it's incompetence by their management:

Mr Kogan said that even though only 3% of his customers used the old version of the browser, his IT team had become pre-occupied with making adaptations to make pages display properly on IE 7.

"I was constantly on the line to my web team. The amount of work and effort involved in making our website look normal on IE7 equalled the combined time of designing for Chrome, Safari and Firefox."

I'd be interested to see exactly how unusable the site really was in IE7 before the effort to make it compatible. If they genuinely did spend all that time developing it so it was 100% right, then they are bigger fools.

Or maybe it's all complete bullsh1t and just Michael O'Leary style advertising.