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Aussie Online Retailer Impose IE7 Tax
First time accepted submitter Techy77 writes "Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. From the article: 'Kogan said his company was able to keep prices low by using technology to make its business efficient and streamlined. however its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7.
"It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions,” Mr Kogan said.
“As Internet citizens, we all have a responsibility to make the Internet a better place. By taking these measures, we are doing our bit.”'"
Wouldnt it just be as effective to block IE7, or stop making effort to code for it ?
While I am sure there will be people complaining, I do have to say I think this is a good idea. It helps get people to using more up to date web browser and stops dragging things along. It also helps keep prices low by making those people help pay the extra coast to keep there outdated browser still working for this their site.
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually. They've been campaigning for people to stop using v7
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
IE 7 is not standards compliant. So, therefore, IE 7 is proprietary internet graphical interface, that can display content from HTTP servers, that is encoded using microsofts proprietary content protocol.....which may be similar, but is not HTML/CSS.
Microsoft chose to do this, in order to try and leverage msHTML into the open internet. They failed. However, the mess they left is still around. Why shouldn't online retailers charge more to customers who insist in using proprietary clients, to cover the cost of converting the standards compliant HTML, to the Microsoft format?
The same amount of effort will be required to make the site IE7 compatible, but there will be less people paying to cover that cost. Eventually I suppose it would come to a point where the tax would need to be so high that everyone will have upgraded or left.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
People have been saying IE is awesome and much better and fixed all the problems of last version, since the the second release. They've been wrong the entire time of course. At this point, why bother with it?
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'?
Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Of course they can. They can charge you whatever they want without giving any reason whatsoever. And you can take your shopping somewhere else. In the end, it probably won't be done on a large scale because people can compare prices on the internet rather easily.
I agree with you on your main point however: Philosophically, this sucks.
Many users who run IE7 either have a.) no choice or b.) no idea what is IE7/IE8/IE9 and the differences between them.
Instead of imposing a tax on them which confuses non-tech-savvy end-users, why not display the "IE7 not supported, please follow these instructions to upgrade"?
This tax probably unnecessarily increases complexity in their billing systems, which is never a good thing.
The term "Microsoft tax" refers to the practice of every PC maker other than Apple to force customers to buy a copy of Windows with every name-brand PC. Is that a tax? It's imposed by law: copyright and patent.
So does firefox, and i imagine chrome uses something similar. Both of these work on XP, and OSX, and Linux...
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Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
Well it depends how they do it...
They chose to code their site to standards, and that then covered any properly written browser...
They had to do a lot of extra work to support IE7, and i imagine any other non standard browser that didn't have such a user base would simply not work at all. It's only fair that users who are more expensive to support, have to pay more to cover the extra support they require.
The alternatives are either:
Everyone else subsidises the extra development work required to support nonstandard browsers...
They simply don't support non standard browsers at all, which will make the (usually fairly technically ignorant) users of those browsers just think the site is broken.
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1) Unknown company(lets call it B) reads story about another unknown company(lets call it A) becoming known by saying something about IE support.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/1222235/startup-skips-ie-support-claims-100000-savings
2) Unknown Company B makes up it's own press release about IE support
3) Unknown Company B becomes known
4) Profit.
Instead of FUD is it too hard to address his points? It kills me in what is supposed to be a technical forum that someone who claims IE is awesome with some examples why is a troll and a response that "IE sucks" is 5 Insightful. We all know /. hates Microsoft. Fine, we get it. But come on, don't mod like an AC.
People have been saying IE is awesome and much better and fixed all the problems of last version, since the the second release. They've been wrong the entire time of course. At this point, why bother with it?
To be really fair to microsoft, IE4 was the best browser of its time, by such a wide margin it just annihilated the competition for about 5 years. IE3 was also about equivalent to Netscape 3 if a little inferior.
Since then, it's been downhill, and then catch up. Still not there yet, but thing actually do improve.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Mod parent up to infinity. It still feels slow, still asks 99 questions to launch the first time, x64 / x86 versions on 64-bit windows are fubar and have plugin compatability problems or issues opening any pages at all, and its ugly. I think microsoft gave up around IE5, to be honest. It was the last time I liked IE.
As a developer, I really don't give a rats ass if IE is lightweight or fast. All I care is that I don't have to dedicate extra time on layout or code that works flawlessly in 4 other browsers. IE9 is damn near at that point already, with IE10 we will have finally arrived.
I can see you're trying to joke, but the sad thing is that many of your examples are true:
Restaurants - Tax for not wearing the right clothes.
Many restaurants won't even let you in if you're not wearing the right clothes, and if they do you can expect sub-par service because you don't look as good. And don't forget restaurants that automatically add 18% to your bill if you have more than a certain number of people in your group!
Tax for asking for modification to your orders.
Again, many places already will charge you more if you ask for a modification that causes them to spend extra time on it or use more expensive ingredients.
Stores - Tax for not wearing the "approved" shoes, since you are causing more wear on the floor.
Again, you won't even be let in if you're not wearing shoes at all.
Government - Tax for being obese.
There's one that's actually not true! Unless you count the heavy taxes on the types of food and drug products that obese people tend to consume more of.
Tax for not being married.
Let's talk about filing income taxes jointly, and how I went from owing the government about $500 per year to them giving me a refund of $1500 after I got married.
Tax for not belonging to the right religion.
So did you know that religious organizations don't have to pay taxes on their property, among other things? And many states have legislation that makes it so that you can't hold public office if you're not religious at all.
Schools - Taxed for being stupid.
The parents of stupid kids may not be taxed individually, but the money spent on kids who repeat years comes from somewhere...
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I was a web developer in the IE4 era, and I had Netscape (versions 4 and 4.5) and Internet Explorer (version 3.5, 4, and eventually 5), even Opera (2 and 3) all available to me (I spent a lot of time in each). I preferred IE; not only did I work less hard to get pages to render correctly, but it was faster and had better features. IE remained my favorite browser through the 6 days. Netscape / Mozilla was such a huge pile of bloat that even though I liked it ideologically, I still didn't care to use it day-to-day. It really wasn't until Firefox came along that I finally found a browser I was willing to use day-to-day that wasn't IE. Of course now Firefox is the pile of bloat that Mozilla used to be (but in a different way), so today I use Chrome.
IE achieved dominance only in part due to desktop monopoly abuse. It also owes a lot to the fact that for quite a while, it really was the best browser.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I agree with the grandparent. IE2 was preinstalled. Upgrading to IE4 was possible via Windows update (but not the default) and since it was such a large download I didn't do that - it would have taken about an hour over my modem. On the other hand, both IE4 and Netscape 4 came on magazine cover disks. I had both installed, but ended up using IE4 because NS4 was crap. Opera might have been better, but I didn't try it until a few years later. Most of the people I knew at the time had similar experiences: they tried both and found IE4 superior.
That doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly to get it installed, but that doesn't alter the fact that it really was better than the competition back then...
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Charging for extra for delivery is nothing the same. That's like saying I can purchase my Amazon basked for £10 cheaper if I collect it myself.
Fragmented web standards are nothing new either, suck it up and roll with it. I don't bill my clients a higher rate just because a new law came into force that makes my industry more complicated - what makes some script kiddy with a copy of Dreamweaver and a PDF W3C certificate so goddamn special?
Not that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but Netscape made a helluva good job of shooting themselves in the foot to the point that for the Mozilla reboot they decided to outright scrap the Netscape code base and start over. And I can attest to that, the last incarnations of the Netscape 4.x series were horrible, buggy, unstable abominations that deserved to be put out of its misery.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thankfully, there are developers who do care about the users more than their own convenience. The ones I buy from.
This statement makes me believe:
As we all know time is money and a business person willing to waste time makes no money.
Rather buying from developers wiling to waste time and pretending they care more about your uses, you should be supporting the developers that care about making a better more convenient enviorment for all users and web developers alike and who are more concerned with saving you money.
They're not an IE developer. They're a web developer. Their only responsibility is ensuring that there's no rendering issue in IE9 or IE10. Or in really rare cases, a performance issue with JS. Otherwise, what works for Webkit works for IE now - more or less. This is a huge deal.
On the basis that the site in question aren't solicitors, or any other form of professionals that bill on a time basis, I find this to be irrelevant. They make money on selling items, their customers are not paying for a service, they are paying for a product. Hopefully this idiocy will prove to be wholly deleterious and they'll get hammered for it.
By Ruslan Kogan's own admission, a mere 3% of his customers use IE7. If he's so wound up about how much time he's spending on that 3% then either he should be a businessman and just stop wasting time on it or stop being such a whiny bitch looking for free advertising by proxy.
If the customers in that 3% actually WARRANT the added work to support them, then this highwayman 6.8% tax wouldn't be considered because their commercial value covers the extra work.
Bottom line, the guy's a moron flogging a frankly stupid idea that is utterly indefensible from a philosophical standpoint and a total non-issue from a business standpoint.