In what appears to be a “first,” Kogan.com, an Australian electronics online retailer, is taxing people utilizing Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser to purchase items from the company website.
What?
According to the BBC, Kogan’s Chief executive Ruslan Kogan said the company wanted to recover the time and costs involved in “rendering the website into a antique browser.”
The charge is between 6.8% – 0.1% for each month since the launch of IE7. This came in 2006 and since then, there’s been two updates.
Here’s Kogan’s Logic
Kogan explained the idea came about when his company began work on a website relaunch. Even though only three percent of customers use the antiquated IE7 brower, IT was spending too much time making adaptions for pages to properly display.
He explained to the BBC, “I was constantly on the line to my web team. The amount of work and effort involved in making our website look normal on IE7 equalled the combined time of designing for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.”
At the end of the day, Kogan said no one will probably end up paying the potential charges. It was just his intent to have users either download a more current version of Internet Explorer or possibly a different browser.
He has been joined by others in the frustration with Internet Explorer. In a Forbes piece called, “Internet Explorer Must Die!” Mark Gibbs expressed discontent with the software and wrote that Microsoft is unwilling to support core web standards that other major browsers support. He said IE6 was terrible and that unless people will either leave IE7 or go to IE8, users are stuck; but they could go to other vendors’ browsers.
Kogan is comfortable with his decision and said to the BBC that he has happy customers and from the announcement, has received praise.
In a recent tweets to Kogan, some wrote, “Love your IE7 tax. I hope it becomes effective” and “Brilliant idea for the #IE tax.”
Maybe change will finally come with the launch of Internet Explorer 10 this fall.
