AfterDawn: News

Online retailer to penalize users who use Internet Explorer 7

The online electronics retailer Kogan has announced on its site today that it will be charging any customer using the site through Internet Explorer 7 with a 6.8 percent tax on their purchase.

Why 6.8 percent? "That's 0.1 per cent for each month IE7 has been on the market," reads the post.



Founder Ruslan Kogan says the tax is because he is forced to spend too much energy (and money) on making the site usable for IE7 users:

"Internet Explorer 7 has long since passed its use-by date. It's a constant source of frustration for our web guys and we're sick of burning cash on a browser that hit the market nearly six years ago. It goes against everything Kogan stands for."

In order to remove the penalty, users can switch to any other modern browser, including IE 8 or later, Chrome, Opera, Firefox or Safari.

Read Kogan's post here: New IE7 tax

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 14 Jun 2012 19:16

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• 12 comments

• xaznboitx

  Ms will not stand for this
  

  14.6.2012 19:42 #1

• Notcow

  Hah! It makes me want to buy something from them.
  
  I bet Google gave 'em a million bucks to do this.
  

  15.6.2012 01:50 #2

• stuntz0rZ

  Alot of things no longer work with old browsers. I don't know why anyone would still be using them. Unless they have an un-activated windowsXP installation which would not allow users to update IE
  

  15.6.2012 04:56 #3

• xnonsuchx

  Maybe if MS didn't wildly change things between releases and stuck with standards YEARS ago. We can't even use IE 9 at work because it doesn't handle some of our web-based tools well (and yes, it's MS not adhering to standards, not the tools, so there's no big push to update all the tools to make sure they're compliant to MS's whims). Not surprising, since MS mostly ignores bug reports of Office, Windows and other products too!

  15.6.2012 08:46 #4

• LordRuss

  Might be M$ using businesses as passive aggressive soldiers for their upgrade 'cause' to upgrade. Possibly even to 7 or the inevitable imploding Windows 8. Who's to completely know, but this is the first creative means by which to coerce 'customers' into complying with someones wishes.
  

  http://onlyinrussellsworld.blogspot.com

  15.6.2012 15:15 #5

• 1nsan3

  i would just add the tax just for even USING internet explorer lol.
  
  IE is for users who are not very computer savey. its your "Basic" browser. just like the crappy ones that come with your cell phone.
  
  I dont use it, i WONT use it, its unsecure to boot. if you see what browser can and cant be hacked, or takes the longest, it sure IS NOT internet explorer. so far i think its always been hacked every year, in under 1 minute. lol.

  15.6.2012 17:46 #6

• phobet

  Originally posted by LordRuss: Might be M$ using businesses as passive aggressive soldiers for their upgrade 'cause' to upgrade. Possibly even to 7 or the inevitable imploding Windows 8. Who's to completely know, but this is the first creative means by which to coerce 'customers' into complying with someones wishes. Not to mention how they managed to monetize their clients reluctance and/or ignorance in keeping their web browser up-to-date.
  

  16.6.2012 02:46 #7

• stardata

  I completely agree with this person 'Ruslan Kogan'. Anyone using a very old browser like internet explorer 7 need a brain check-up as it's too old and obsolete. If these people like explorer why don't they download explorer 9 as it has way better security and also looks better. I'm not going to get into a browser war but the latest firefox 13 is excellent so use that if you don't want to upgrade explorer or maybe it's just downright lazyness that people won't upgrade.
  

  16.6.2012 20:08 #8

• xtago

  In some countries this would be against the law.
  
  I honestly fail to see how IE7 could be causing problems unless you are trying to do stuff that wasn't fully ratified by the standard bodies they take quite a long time to get stuff sorted.
  
  They still haven't done WWW5 100% yet and that's taken a good 5+ years so far, a big problem has been the video side you have google wanting something that will still work with flash and apple want something that'll only work with itunes/quicktime.
  
  MS want their own video codecs as the video standard.
  
  WWW5 body has been talking about doing their own thing.
  
  I think WWW3 would have been going through the exact same thing but it was about what and how to get java/javascript/activex/xml/style sheets/asp/php etc to work properly with each other and to get them to show up properly on all browsers and OSes at the time.
  
  just looked at their site and they have that someone bought blah adware crap in corner and stuff all that crap will break browsers and stuff, also makes me not want to bother with the site seeing that crap come up also.
  
  Ebay pages are done in a simple way for a reason it's simple and it works on everything, maybe kogan should forget about the gimmick crap and just do a proper web shop site.

  16.6.2012 21:38 #9

• xboxd00d

  Using ie7 is a bit like owning a nice house but living in the garden shed, admittedly the shed will stop u getting wet when it rains but the house is just better.
  But to second what another poster said, ie sux, it's slow, unreliable, vulnerable and worse of all it comes from the giant money magnet that is, micro$haft.
  Firefox all the way for me!
  

  "Trying is the first step towards Failure" Homer.J.Simpson

  29.6.2012 07:14 #10

• andypryce

  The latest bug discovered in Firefox is more serious than most. The latest version of the Mozilla browser, Firefox 13, comes with a tabbed browsing feature that shows a list of recent websites when you open a new tab.
  
  No problem with this you might think - Chrome and Internet Explorer do the same. But the problem with the implementation on Firefox is that the website thumbnails show pictures of secure websites.
  
  And this means that they can display online banking and webmail sessions for example, complete with account numbers, balances, subject lines and so on. This can happen even if you are logged out of the sites in question, meaning that a snooper can take a look at important sensitive data just by opening a new browser tab.
  
  Firefox is designed to automatically update itself, so if you're a Firefox user you most probably already have the bug ridden version installed on your system.
  
  Mozilla have admitted that this is a problem and that they shouldn't be creating copies of this information from secure sites and storing them on your PC. Such sites are secure for a reason after all.
  
  So, if you're a Firefox user you should expect a patch from Mozilla which fixes the problem.
  
  But until that happens, you can turn the thumbnail view off to stop the problem from happening. Here's how:
  1. In the Firefox, press [Ctrl] + [T] to open a new tab.
  2. In the address bar, type about:config and press [Enter].
  3. Double-click on the option browser.newtabpage.enabled to set the Value field to false.
  4. Close the tab.

  3.7.2012 13:57 #11

• ddp

  can also turn off the auto-update if you want, did that with mine.
  

  3.7.2012 15:44 #12