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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.
Then we can can go back and eradicate the outhouse developers who wrote code that doesn't run on browsers other than IE7 in business environments and for which there is no budget to develop new costly solutions.
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?
...gets you shot.
Not only have they campaigned to get people move from v7, Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are actually pretty awesome browsers. They're finally lightweight and share similar design to Chrome and Firefox, they are standards compliant and they feel great to use. On top of that they are currently the most secure browsers because of heavy sandboxing, JIT hardening and so on. Microsoft did a really good work with the new versions.
No. At some point there will be so few people using IE7 that they will stop supporting it.
I'm on IE6 and don't have to pay the tax lol.
Summation 2
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.
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.
The wider implication as I see it is as people are economically encouraged to use standards-compliant browsers, companies are economically encouraged to produce them. If the surcharge is truly based on support for non-standards-compliant browsers, it shouldn't affect only IE7/M$. For Kogan to point directly to IE7 is a pretty good PR stunt though.
If that's the case why are they wasting all this time and money supporting IE7 when they could simply stop supporting it and put a message saying "this website will not work with IE7, please upgrade to IE8 or later or one of these other browsers.."? Not that I'm doubting you, it just makes no sense.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Aren't you effectively telling your customers... Try our site in ALL available browsers to see which one gives you the largest discount? Today they are charging for IE7, tomorrow for Opera and the day after that for Firefox?
Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are actually pretty awesome browsers.
That might be so, but I don't like them because I need Windows Vista or Windows 7 to be able to test my web apps with them, unlike most of the other browsers which are cross-platform. They are locked in to Microsoft and force developers to run Windows if they want to ensure compatibility. I can't even use the ancient Windows XP laptop I keep around for the IE6, 7, and 8 testing, because for some reason they've decided the newer browsers won't run on XP (for marketing rather than technical reasons I expect).
Varying opinions on what "really good work" is.
bickerdyke
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...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
This is a stunt, pure and simple. IE7 use is trivial and you can readily conclude that people who haven't upgraded in 10 years are NOT the primary customer of a computer retailer. People that cheap, don't buy stuff.
The owner of the company is well known for pulling publicity stunts. And hopefully most aussies got a better sense of humor then the whiners above.
As for those saying he should instead display a warning, the site does exactly that, http://www.afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/06/14/Photos/724adc40-b5bf-11e1-a3fb-e6c175e978e8_IE%20tax--236x197.jpg
I wonder why so many are offended by a joke, maybe a lot of them really shouldn't be on this TECH site because they still run IE7 themselves?
This is NOT a business plan or a real tax. It is a publicity stunt to create traffic at the cost of non-existent customers. You don't think that this company really thinks that after a plain warning that customers will be charged more, IE7 users will really pay the increased price? Mind you, they are IE7 users. In reality Kogan looked at their stats, saw a tiny non-significant IE7 usage that their web dev team still had to develop for at greater cost then this groups produces in profit and decided to stir the pot, get some free publicity and be considered by anyone with a sense of a humor as a bunch of all right blokes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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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IE is about the only browser which is both non standard enough to require extra work to support, and widely used enough that doing that extra work is economically viable...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Microsoft provides Virtual PC images for a range of IE + Windows versions to test your website with.
Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575
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.
its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7
That's a common problem with "new" web sites. Try writing an "old" web site. It will do everything you need it to do, but it'll be faster, and run on every browser. It can still look very pretty, too.
Or, at the very least, test in increments using various browsers, instead of once you're finished. When I was in college, incremental testing easily made the difference between passing and failing a programming course.
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!
Switching between black and white skin color is rather... involved. Switching gender, sexual preference, height, natural hair color is equally difficult, if not impossible.
Upgrading to a different browser, on the other hand, is what most people do quite regularly. Usuallly it involves a few minutes at most.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
or change browsers before check out.
Or... and I know this sounds kinda crazy... change browsers before even starting to browse the site!
Why would anybody want to use IE7 when they have a more capable browser installed just to switch to right before checkout?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It also costs money, where the others are free.
So. There's that.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
But come on, don't mod like an AC.
AC gets mod points now? That could explain a few things.
Anyhow, not being the GP, I can't presume to speak from him, but from what I can tell, the new IE is far from lightweight as his parent post says. The binary is small, because all the code has been made part of the OS itself. It gobbles up a couple of hundred megabytes preloaded with the OS before you start it. To see the real difference, install a fresh OS, reboot three times to get the startup program paging files created, start the browser and check the system's memory usage.
Then upgrade IE, and repeat.
Then upgrade IE again, and repeat.
Faster - for some things, certainly. The best thing since sliced bread? Hardly. Too many incompatibilities and peculiarities, especially in CSS handling and scaling.
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?
Because they defined "good work" as "locks everyone into a Windows-only monoculture".
Skin pigmentation != Browser choice.
If you want a proper analogy, this is like charging a customer more because they want to pay with Amex, which is quite common here because Amex costs retailers more than Mastercard or Visa transactions.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
But come on, don't mod like an AC.
AC gets mod points now? That could explain a few things.
Anyhow, not being the GP, I can't presume to speak from him, but from what I can tell, the new IE is far from lightweight as his parent post says. The binary is small, because all the code has been made part of the OS itself. It gobbles up a couple of hundred megabytes preloaded with the OS before you start it. To see the real difference, install a fresh OS, reboot three times to get the startup program paging files created, start the browser and check the system's memory usage.
Then upgrade IE, and repeat.
Then upgrade IE again, and repeat.
Faster - for some things, certainly. The best thing since sliced bread? Hardly. Too many incompatibilities and peculiarities, especially in CSS handling and scaling.
they think it's lightweight because the controls bar in the application takes less space..
anyhow.. if it supported webgl, then it would be up to par. as it doesn't, we're once again held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago. "yay!"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
the mental disabilities that steer one to using particular browsers are not chosen.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
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.
From a security and performance stand point, IE is probably in the vanguard where the core browser is concerned. This is especially true on 64-bit platforms where you have ASLR and DEP; in that environment even if some does get out of the sandbox by some method its unlikely to get them anywhere. There is some weakness in Microsoft's ASLR implementation, in that the "low part" of the pointers remain predictable.
IE does not have addons you mention. The lack of ability to modify IE without binary extensions is a drawback. Not having grease-monkey equivalent is keeping off IE on my Windows box.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
Should you be shopping on PCs you don't manage? If its work related, then I think they may allow for a browser upgrade to save a 6.8% fee. This is how you finally push businesses to start keeping up with progress. Are they still stuck on XP? Well then download fucking Chrome/Opera/Firefox/Safari!
Public school systems in the USA require students to have certain vaccinations in order to enroll in the student-body. Is this fair? For the benefit of man-kind, vaccinate your children and educate the bastards. Its the same thing. For the benefit of the tech industry, we need to enforce certain things. If that means forcing a browser upgrade/change, then so be it. Continuing with old tech is harmful to more than just the people using it. The website could kindly suggest upgrading to the newest version of IE. If that is not possible given the version of the OS, suggest an alternative until the OS can be upgraded. This keeps the anti-competitive levels low. I would suggest the same things for old versions of other browsers as well.
As for the ADA? That's besides the point.
>kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
About a dozen, several award winners. I've had projects included in the cover CD's of major Linux Magazines (more than once).
And your point is er... bullshit. The problem you cite only exists for people who don't play by the rules. If your code is free software you will never have to support any distribution but your own. You know why ? Because if it's good and users want it then other distributions will build and include it FOR you.
The problem here only exists for proprietory software that won't ALLOW those distributions to build for them.
Even then the distributions will make an effort if they are allowed. If you don't give them the code they will try their best to provide a working package - and bear the support burden on your behalf - if you at LEAST allow redistribution.
If you don't allow redistribution or support, then guess what- the reason Linux is hard to support is because you refuse to do things the linux way. No linux developer tries to support multiple distributions, we build on our favourite, and let the other distributions who want to include the stuff package it for us.
Even for the few others, there are options - Icculus has done great work porting and maintaining cross-distro installers for many games on Linux - all we need is for the companies to LET us.
We don't even need them to PROVIDE Linux versions, just ALLOW us and we'll do the work to support linux FOR them. The community has proven that over and over with every company who did allow them.
The difficulty of gaming on Linux is a direct result of the publishers ultra-copyright-and-drm model.
Even Blizzard with their proprietory programs which do at least allow redistribution (and relies on web-authentication to ensure compliance) has their games running very well on Linux and they don't even have ports. People actually go out of their way to provide patches for wine to support blizzard games (Diablo 3 worked on release day !)
Basically - if a game doesn't work on Linux, it's because the publishers shot themselves in the foot, they don't have to DO anything, just ALLOW the community and we'll do all the work FOR them - and even if it's only 1% extra sales, an increase of 1% in sales at ZERO cost, is a bloody huge margin.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I used to work for a company some time ago and I clearly remember the amount of days those web dev spent just to get the website looking like all the others. I was surprised by the amount of days and headaches those guys spent just so that IE6 and 7 would look like all other browsers. But fortunately, the company was paid to do so, and their clients paid them....thank god they did.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I hate to be picky about word use, FSM knows I play fast and loose myself, but isn't it time to drop the use of tax as a word that is synonymous with fee and go back to the traditional meaning?
Tax: a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually.
It doesn't. There's a screenshot in TFA -- they only link to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (in this order).
Who cares. In the modern world every OS comes preloaded with a web browser, and not only is it included by default it's expected by the users. There are plenty of web browsers out right now that don't come preloaded, and they are immensely popular. Yes, there was a case due to microsofts practices to ensure new pc's only had windows, but the bundling of IE was hardly the nail in the coffin that people think it was. All they did was put themselves ahead of the curve. Netscape couldn't compete because of their own business failures. Not because the OS came with a browser. If this was the case the same argument would hold true today, and it most certainly does not.
Well then don't buy from Microsoft since they did not want to take the extra time required to make their browser almost standard compliant until the 10th major release.
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.
That browser only ran on one platform....
Or, just write standard HTML and don't worry about which browsers support it.
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.
Let me get this straight. You pass on the cost of doing business to the customer, just like every other company? Sounds like par for the course.
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Actually, there used to be an IE for Mac.
.sig withheld by request
Opera was better. I was a poor college student and bought an Opera 3.x license for ~$30 in '98 because it was that much better (and faster!) than NS4 and IE4.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You've explained why everyone had it installed, but not why everyone used it. Their bundling ensured that IE was installed on every computer, but it didn't prevent the user from simply installing and using an alternative. The quality of IE4 did.
rather than tweaking layouts, writing exception rules or writing work around for one browser that holds less than 30% of the market
That's a pretty fat tail there!
Yes, Pareto principle and all, spend your efforts on the 20% that give 80% of the income.
But if you alienate a substantial part of your user base, you won't attract the ones you have coded for either. All they will have heard about it is bad things. Because the Pareto principle works both ways - the 20% who are dissatisfied will cause 80% of your losses.
And, in any case, if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong. Use subsets that are supported across the line, and write HTML/css so it degrades gracefully. It's not hard. Really.
if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong.
LOL, I love this, you're obviously not a web developer or you would really understand the true issues here. You don't or you wouldn't be making such a blatantly stupid statement.
Use subsets that are supported across the line, and write HTML/css so it degrades gracefully. It's not hard. Really.
This is also stupid, if you were using a subset of HTML/CSS supported across the line you wouldn't have to write HTML/CSS that degrades gracefully. We write code that degrades gracefully because we support Internet explorer, which doesn't ad-hear to web standards.
I'd like to say sorry your failing to understand the true problem, but it's obvious the true issue is you just refuse to see what's wrong with your line of thinking. Go develop some web sites for clients looking to implement the latest standards and technologies, then come back and argue how important it is to support 20% of the market rather than just telling them to upgrade to a modern browser.