Australian Etailer, Kogan, Introduces 6.8% ‘IE7 Tax’
It’s surprising how many people and businesses still cling to Microsoft’s outdated six year old IE7 browser. It has since been superceded by IE8 for Windows XP and IE9 for Vista and 7, with IE10 soon to make its debut on Windows 8. Using such an old and in particular, non-W3C standards compliant browser makes for a costs and support headache for modern website developers, since these mostly follow the W3C international standards for web pages, which won’t look right on IE7. To make them work properly, the web developers have to make special versions just for this obsolete browser.
Australian internet retailer kogan.com isn’t happy about the support costs involved either, but instead of just absorbing the costs has decided to do something about this by charging an ‘IE7 tax’ of 6.8% at the checkout, should a customer attempt to buy something using IE7. However, this is really an encouragement to simply upgrade away from IE7 by using a modern browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or even the latest IE8 and IE9 browsers, since they advise using one of these as a way of avoiding this ‘tax’, which would be more correctly called a surcharge. So, what happens if a customer is still using the decade old IE6? Blank page?
The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined. One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge – that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market. It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions.
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