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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.”'"
Don't lie. The reason that browser had any market at all was that M$ had illegally abused its desktop monopoly to stifle competition in the browser market. Quite simply, every desktop computer sold came with a copy of Windows, and every copy of Windows came with a copy of MSIE. Netscape, the then superior browser, could not compete with pre-installed.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
Not true. They forced installation by tying it to everything possible. It came with all Microsft apps, of course, but they also tied comctl32.dll to it so if you wanted to use new GUI controls in your app you ended up having to install Internet Explorer in the end user's machine as a requirement of your app. eg. I remember installing Autocad and being forced to install IE at the same time.
Reff: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh298349(v=vs.85).aspx
See how many versions of the dll have "Internet Explorer" associated with them.
Since then, it's been downhill, and then catch up. Still not there yet, but thing actually do improve.
They didn't upgrade IE for about ten years. Their OS monopoly, dirty tricks (above) and OEM license deals meant they didn't need to make any effort to get it onto machines. It was pretty hard to avoid it, and impossible for OEMs to install anything else by default.
No sig today...