According to Ruslan Kogan this is the world's first Internet Explorer 7 "tax".
Posted on 06/15/2012 8:11:39 AM PDT by ShadowAce
According to Ruslan Kogan this is the world's first Internet Explorer 7 "tax".
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.
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.
Every month the surcharge will rise by 0.1%.
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."
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.
Mr Kogan told the BBC his customers were very happy and he had received a lot of praise for his efforts.
"Love your IE7 tax. I hope it becomes effective" was one of the messages posted to Kogan on Twitter.
IE7 was launched in 2006, but since then Microsoft has released two major updates to the software.
The launch of Internet Explorer 10 is due in the autumn.
I don’t know if this is the answer, but it is an approach to the problem.
Microsoft intentionally tries to do things that - if a website works for them - will not work for other browsers. Their stated goal some time back was to replace non-proprietary code with their proprietary code. Javascript for example.
MS purpose was that since they have the major market share developers had to develop for IE, and would be more likely not to do what it then took to make it work for standards compliant browsers - thus making those users switch thinking their browsers were deficient. When it was MS causing the problem.
When I was developing this was a major source of problems and frustration.
The solution is for MS to make browsers that are compliant enabling developers to code to a standard and the internet to work for all browsers.
There may be other and better solutions, but whatever forces encourage MS to not try to own the internet via their current method is a good thing IMHO.
How long have you been married to yours?
I’m a polygamist, I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Consider an upgrade to w3m.
Showoff.
Rumor has it that IE 9 was a major revamp, featuring tight standards compliance and vastly improved JavaScript performance. But I wouldn't know, because I'm too cheap to spring for Windows 7.
I’m not. I have 4 different browsers installed on this machine, that I use for different purposes. The thing is, I choose when I want to use those browsers, not some jackass running a webstore. As I said, I’d refuse to patronize him because of his arrogance, not because I am too lazy to switch to the other browser.
Hmm, but can I play MUDs on that?
Sounds like principle for the sake of... nothing.
Firefox.
Great! Come visit my IIS 4.0 run site!
I don’t reward companies that ignore the first rule of customer service, because they don’t deserve to prosper. That isn’t actually for the sake of nothing, it’s for the sake of discouraging bad business practices.
The thing is so insecure they have to patch it every fifteen minutes.
And getting AJAX to render correctly in it is a nightmare.
“I consider discouraging the use of IE to be a good business practice.”
Well, there’s where you reveal your personal bias that is clouding your understanding. Discouraging the use of IE is certainly a good business practice for Microsoft’s competitors, but for a webstore that is completely unrelated to the browser market it is “mission creep” that can only hurt them.
I don't know.
However, I notice there turns out to be a package that enables w3m to show images in character mode. On Ubuntu, you can install both packages with sudo apt-get install w3m w3m-img.
You can even exit your X session and type w3m google.com on your system console, and it still works!
There is also supposed to be a w3m-js package in the works to allow JavaScript to run in w3m.
I bet you get that a lot.
Pff, if I can’t play antique multi-user text games on it, I’m sticking with Telnet :)
You get used to it when you are surrounded by idiots.
You gotta ask yourself what kind of idiot surrounds himself with idiots.
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