It’s been three years since Internet Explorer 7 was officially replaced, and many people have yet to update to another browser. According to StatCounter, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) accounted for 1.53 percent of browser use worldwide in May 2012. It’s a good sign in the struggle to get users to use current technology, but for retailers, those 1.53 percent of users will be repeat customers, meaning that those same retailers have to spend time and money to make their websites compatible with the outdated browser and eat the cost. At least, that’s been the standard response. One Australian electronics retailer took matters into his own hands last week when he announced that Kogan.com will charge a fee for purchases made using IE7. CEO Ruslan Kogan announced the surcharge in a blog post last week.
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:
Kogan is far from alone on his disdain for IE7, both because it’s a Microsoft product and because it’s well past the expiration date. Casting aspersions at IE and other Microsoft products is practically a sport for web developers, and even Microsoft is trying to get people off of their own old products. The software giant recently announced that it will cease all support for Windows XP and the 2003 Office Suite in 2014, and Microsoft is actively campaigning to get the world to stop using IE6 with an entire website dedicated to watching usage drop below one percent.
Before consumer advocates get too excited, there’s an easy way to get around Kogan’s “tax” (in American parlance, a “fee”). As the IE7 warning points out, all customers have to do is make their purchase using another browser, even the also-outdated IE8, so it’s unlikely that many customers will actually pay the fee, if any do at all.
It’s an interesting experiment, though, and I at least am curious what would happen if one of the online retailer giants like Amazon joined Kogan in its IE7 fee. One thing we know: getting people to use current browsers would help cut costs — and headaches — for non-retailer sites immensely.
People criticise Microsoft for bundling IE with Windows, but I think it’s a great idea. After all, without any kind of repository/package management system, how else are Windows users going to be able to download a decent browser?
We do not criticise Micro$oft for that. Have you ever tried to make a website? Actually you spend 80% of your time to make it look the same in IE 8 7 6 . Class in html to use conditional css, CSS hacks, borders/padding/margin appearing from nowhere, no css opacity support and even with filters the result doesn’t look nice, no inner shadows, stupid tricks to force has layout, breaking jquery code for a single trailing comma etc etc etc etc.
So from a web designer side of view: i HATE IE. Even if ie 10 11 12 13 will be the best browser i will never use it. They made me spent so much time for no reason. If it was only one version ok. But it isn’t. So they did it on purpose. Why? Think about it.