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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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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
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!
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?
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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.
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.
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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