Internet Explorer 7 Tax - Neatorama

Are you still using IE7 browser? Then you'd be paying an extra "tax" if you shop at Australian online retailer Kogan.com:

Chief executive Ruslan Kogan told the BBC he wanted to recoup the time and costs involved in "rendering the website into a antique browser".
The charge is set to 6.8% - 0.1% for every month since the IE7 launch.
According to Mr Kogan the idea was born when the company started working on a site relaunch.
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."

Looking at Neatorama's own log, 1.68% of you still browse with IE7. Tsk tsk. Upgrade, guys!

To be clear -- that was 100 bucks I paid for the early 2000s computer. I bought it in 2007 and it's still kicking.

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Older hardware? Please.

The problem is IE. More broadly, the problem is MS + Web. Crap.

I picked up a second hand Dell box from the early 2000s for about $100 and installed Linux for free and was good to go.

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Exactly, InsaniD. Just because it's free, doesn't mean everybody has the hardware that can support it.

I probably wouldn't shop at such a smarmy-sounding site, even with my currently up-to-date browser.

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Well, to be fair, older PC's have a harder time running IE8, which is sort of a resource hog.
Not everyone can afford to run out and buy the newest technology every year...

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If only I could! My job is unable to upgrade from IE7 easily. Sadly, many of the sites I need to do my job are quickly becoming incompatible with the older browser. I asked if I could download a newer version or Firefox to use along side it, but all the red tape says, "No." Bleh.

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IE7 is still used by a lot of companies (why I sometimes visit the site with IE7) and the government because they do not upgrade many of the backoffice tools like sharepoint as often as they should and the security standards for IE8 or 9 or chrome are not compatible.

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@Absent, No its .1% for every month since IE7 launched because that's when they should have dumped IE altogether and went to Firefox or Chrome

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Shouldn't it be 0.1% for every month since the IE8 launched? That's the month users should have ditched IE7.

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yep...we have customers in Arkansas that insist on using ie7...and that was after a struggle to get them to dump ie6...something about government computer procurement

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I sometime design web apps for the provincial government (I'm Canadian, not from the 18th century) which still uses IE7 (Then again maybe it is the 18th century!) and it pisses me off everytime. I cannot believe that they can't upgrade something as basic AND free.
That tax is welcome and I hope more will follow their example.

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Hear, Hear, Skipweasel! I'll bet that one of the alternative browsers will pay for referrals from Neatorama.

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Wouldn't it be simpler if they just displayed a message "Sorry, this site no longer supports your old browser. Try one of these..." and a few links.

Then again, our school only just managed to get shot of IE6!

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The fact that people use IE at all, let alone a super old one is funny.

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