Aussie Online Retailer Impose IE7 Tax 365
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.”'"
Block or ignore IE7 perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Block or ignore IE7 perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, 'cos that wouldn't get you the free publicity of being on /., boing boing etc. I've never heard of Kogan, and I lived in Aus for 7 years. Do now.
Re:Block or ignore IE7 perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)
Kogan is reasonably well known: founded in 2006, they are one of the fastest growing Australian companies. [wikipedia.org] They aimed to release the world's first Android phone [engadget.com] back in 2008/2009, were the first with a ChromeBook [slashdot.org], and they produce their own Agora line of Android devices. [kogan.co.uk]
This particular move may be clever marketing, but they also have a recent history of ambition and innovation beyond what you'd expect from a medium sized Australian consumer electronics retailer.
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Don't forget the endless and amusing conniptions they give to Gerry Harvey of "Hardly Normal", king of wildly inflated prices.
Re:Block or ignore IE7 perhaps? (Score:5, Interesting)
i only hear about them earlier this year. Samsung sent them a C&D to stop advertising tat their TVs used Samsung panels............which they bought from Samsung and still have Samsung logos on them. Apple also successfully stopped them from selling grey import iPads at international prices. (we get quite stooged on electronics here)
i can't quite understand how grey market could ever be deemed illegal.
Re:Block or ignore IE7 perhaps? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised that you didn't hear of them when they routed around the court ruling banning Samsung from importing Galaxy Tabs. Kogan started importing them themselves, from non-Samsung exporters, thus not triggering the legal restriction, and was selling them in Australia when no other retailer was.
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>>> my choice of software is none of their fucking business
Actually it is, since they have to write special code to support your shitty IE6 or 7 browser. Of course I don't think a tax is the right solution. It would be better to just serve the standards-compliant webpage, and if your particular browser does not work properly, then too fucking bad. Learn to upgrade.
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No, just state up front 'we care about your business, we don't support your browser since its really really old and you may have problems, but good luck'. That would be a better solution to give a PAYING CUSTOMER.
Except for the *AAs ( and the book publishers now i guess ) which have completely lost their minds, when did it become accepted business practice to piss on your customers?
Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people using IE7 are probably stuck with it at work or on a work laptop and can't do anything about it, so I doubt it will "encourage" much upgrading unfortunately.
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Firefox has the auto updater which OUGHT be keeping most folks up to date, and even old versions of chrome are pretty web dev friendly.
All 4 users of opera might have reasons to grumble if they are still using an ancient version, for some absurd reason.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
All 4 users of opera
It is fucking ironic in a thread about web browsers to insult the one with the longest history of adherence to web standards in the process of criticising IE, whose only claim to fame is its (past) popularity.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a few important differences here...
Old firefox/chrome are quite standards compliant, so unless you are using new features everything will look the same anyway... If you are using those new features, then HTML is designed to degrade gracefully and so should still work but just look less pretty. This is why many sites work in text browsers like lynx or links..
Also, the vast majority of firefox or chrome users tend to upgrade to current versions.
IE on the other hand has broken implementations, which will result in very non graceful errors, totally broken/unusable functionality or major rendering errors.
As such, making the site work in IE is considerably more work than allowing it to degrade gracefully in a standards compliant browser.
When it comes to old browsers which require explicit work to support, IE is about the only one that is still being used anywhere... The others, eg netscape are so rare as to get lost in the noise... They're not going to expend any effort to support browsers which are used by 0.00001% of users.
Tax should be used to fund time travel research (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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my kingdom for some mod points.
IE6 (Score:2, Funny)
...gets you shot.
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Same stuff for Mosaic 1.0 and 3.0 (crash). The site seems to work in Lynx but I was unable to find the shopping cart in the 23 pages of rubbish.
The fancy JavaScript doesn't work in SeaMonkey 2.13a1 nightly (build 20120613003002) for some reason. Too bad, I won't buy anything then (here in Europe)...
economy of scale (Score:2, Insightful)
The same amount of effort will be required to make the site IE7 compatible, but there will be less people paying to cover that cost. Eventually I suppose it would come to a point where the tax would need to be so high that everyone will have upgraded or left.
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No. At some point there will be so few people using IE7 that they will stop supporting it.
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Read the article. it is less than 1% of people who visit the website
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as the number of IE7 using customers decreases, the rate of tax will have to increase
That would only follow if there was a requirement to cover the costs of IE7 out of the revenue obtained from the customers. Private businesses do not have to follow such a restrictive rule (and in fact almost always don't). Nor really do governments, but politics is a dirty game run by people who feel it necessary to act like morons.
Look at the details, and you'll see that the costs of supporting IE7 were already wildly disproportionate to the revenue obtained from it, so increasing the charges still won't
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Hassle to keep multiple IEs installed (Score:2)
If that's the case why are they wasting all this time and money supporting IE7 when they could simply stop supporting it and put a message saying "this website will not work with IE7, please upgrade to IE8 or later or one of these other browsers.."?
Because it's a hassle to keep multiple versions of Windows Internet Explorer installed on a single PC: IE 7 for the web applications or ActiveX applications that one uses at work and IE 8 for browsing public web sites while on break. Or because you're not a member of the Administrators group on the PC that you use daily and therefore lack privileges to upgrade IE or to install Chromium Browser, Firefox, or Opera.
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So use a browser that doesn't need to be installed on the machine where you lack admin rights...
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable [portableapps.com]
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Because that wouldn't be news.
Marketing people hate sane ideas; they're too common.
Why changing the user agent might not work (Score:2)
Re:economy of scale (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Suckers! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm on IE6 and don't have to pay the tax lol.
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Out of curiosity, why?
Display a standard notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many users who run IE7 either have a.) no choice or b.) no idea what is IE7/IE8/IE9 and the differences between them.
Instead of imposing a tax on them which confuses non-tech-savvy end-users, why not display the "IE7 not supported, please follow these instructions to upgrade"?
This tax probably unnecessarily increases complexity in their billing systems, which is never a good thing.
Re:Display a standard notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) This is mainly a publicity stunt with an end message.
2) If your billing system can't handle something like this, you probably shouldn't be running a business of that size.
3) Do you really think they will argue if you phone up and tell them you were using Opera or Firefox with User Agent Switching and ask for the original price?
4) Hitting customers in the wallet is the BEST way to grab their attention. I guarantee the response will be larger than if they'd put a 600-pixel-high red flashing banner warning about IE7 for IE7 users of their website.
5) The point is: The people "with no choice" do have a choice. They can pay more or not order at all. Which is incentive enough, if you use this company a lot, to see about upgrading / switching to a better browser. ("Why have our costs to suppliers go up 10%? Because we use IE6? Why don't we install Firefox just for that purpose if nothing else?").
IT has hidden behind the "the IT guys won't let us" banner for too long. If your systems absolutely, categorically cannot upgrade to later versions of IE or Firefox, then you have to wonder what your IT department actually DO for a living and just how much concern they have for the safety of your business data.
It's no different to saying "Sorry, I can't stop logging in as root on an unfirewalled machine to browse Flash websites, the IT guys won't let me." - That would wash with my employers about as much as asking them to use Sinclair ZX Spectrums and pocket calculators instead of PC's. And what better way to demonstrate how out-of-touch your IT department is than to charge them MORE because of the hassle they cause OTHERS by using that old software (let alone the potential hassle they cause themselves).
Try all the browsers (Score:3)
Re:Try all the browsers (Score:4, Funny)
Perfect. Additional hits means additional ad dollars.
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Perfect. Additional hits means additional ad dollars.
Not sure ad-dollars are the preferred choice of revenue for a shop.
All posters above deprived of a sense of humor? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [afr.com]
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.
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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.
(emphasis mine)
IE8 was released three, not ten years ago. Heck, IE7 wasn't even released ten years ago.
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The next two points are: "Don't mention IE8 / 9. Get sued into oblivion by Microsoft."
This won't end well.
The steps (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Unknown company(lets call it B) reads story about another unknown company(lets call it A) becoming known by saying something about IE support.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/1222235/startup-skips-ie-support-claims-100000-savings [slashdot.org]
2) Unknown Company B makes up it's own press release about IE support
3) Unknown Company B becomes known
4) Profit.
You're doing it wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Rather reminds me... (Score:2)
IE7 Nightmare (Score:2)
Tax? (Score:3)
I hate to be picky about word use, FSM knows I play fast and loose myself, but isn't it time to drop the use of tax as a word that is synonymous with fee and go back to the traditional meaning?
Tax: a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Informative)
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Varying opinions on what "really good work" is.
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Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Because they defined "good work" as "locks everyone into a Windows-only monoculture".
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Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are actually pretty awesome browsers.
That might be so, but I don't like them because I need Windows Vista or Windows 7 to be able to test my web apps with them, unlike most of the other browsers which are cross-platform. They are locked in to Microsoft and force developers to run Windows if they want to ensure compatibility. I can't even use the ancient Windows XP laptop I keep around for the IE6, 7, and 8 testing, because for some reason they've decided the newer browsers won't run on XP (for marketing rather than technical reasons I expect).
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Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
So does firefox, and i imagine chrome uses something similar. Both of these work on XP, and OSX, and Linux...
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com]
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
they think it's lightweight because the controls bar in the application takes less space..
anyhow.. if it supported webgl, then it would be up to par. as it doesn't, we're once again held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago. "yay!"
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Erm... (Score:4)
Well then don't buy from Microsoft since they did not want to take the extra time required to make their browser almost standard compliant until the 10th major release.
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Thankfully, there are developers who do care about the users more than their own convenience. The ones I buy from.
This statement makes me believe:
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rather than tweaking layouts, writing exception rules or writing work around for one browser that holds less than 30% of the market
That's a pretty fat tail there!
Yes, Pareto principle and all, spend your efforts on the 20% that give 80% of the income.
But if you alienate a substantial part of your user base, you won't attract the ones you have coded for either. All they will have heard about it is bad things. Because the Pareto principle works both ways - the 20% who are dissatisfied will cause 80% of your losses.
And, in any case, if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong. Use subsets tha
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if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong.
LOL, I love this, you're obviously not a web developer or you would really understand the true issues here. You don't or you wouldn't be making such a blatantly stupid statement.
Use subsets that are supported across the line, and write HTML/css so it degrades gracefully. It's not hard. Really.
This is also stupid, if you were using a subset of HTML/CSS supported across the line you wouldn't have to write HTML/CSS that degrades gracefully. We write code that degrades gracefully because we support Internet explorer, which doesn't ad-hear to web standards.
I'd like to say sorry your failing to understand the true problem, b
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not an IE developer. They're a web developer. Their only responsibility is ensuring that there's no rendering issue in IE9 or IE10. Or in really rare cases, a performance issue with JS. Otherwise, what works for Webkit works for IE now - more or less. This is a huge deal.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Opera was better. I was a poor college student and bought an Opera 3.x license for ~$30 in '98 because it was that much better (and faster!) than NS4 and IE4.
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but Netscape made a helluva good job of shooting themselves in the foot to the point that for the Mozilla reboot they decided to outright scrap the Netscape code base and start over. And I can attest to that, the last incarnations of the Netscape 4.x series were horrible, buggy, unstable abominations that deserved to be put out of its misery.
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Mod parent up to infinity. It still feels slow, still asks 99 questions to launch the first time, x64 / x86 versions on 64-bit windows are fubar and have plugin compatability problems or issues opening any pages at all, and its ugly. I think microsoft gave up around IE5, to be honest. It was the last time I liked IE.
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From a security and performance stand point, IE is probably in the vanguard where the core browser is concerned. This is especially true on 64-bit platforms where you have ASLR and DEP; in that environment even if some does get out of the sandbox by some method its unlikely to get them anywhere. There is some weakness in Microsoft's ASLR implementation, in that the "low part" of the pointers remain predictable.
IE does not have addons you mention. The lack of ability to modify IE without binary extensions
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
It also costs money, where the others are free.
So. There's that.
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Informative)
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually.
It doesn't. There's a screenshot in TFA -- they only link to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (in this order).
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you on your main point however: Philosophically, this sucks.
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Switching between black and white skin color is rather... involved. Switching gender, sexual preference, height, natural hair color is equally difficult, if not impossible.
Upgrading to a different browser, on the other hand, is what most people do quite regularly. Usuallly it involves a few minutes at most.
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That browser only ran on one platform....
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Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
The wider implication as I see it is as people are economically encouraged to use standards-compliant browsers, companies are economically encouraged to produce them. If the surcharge is truly based on support for non-standards-compliant browsers, it shouldn't affect only IE7/M$. For Kogan to point directly to IE7 is a pretty good PR stunt though.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well it depends how they do it...
They chose to code their site to standards, and that then covered any properly written browser...
They had to do a lot of extra work to support IE7, and i imagine any other non standard browser that didn't have such a user base would simply not work at all. It's only fair that users who are more expensive to support, have to pay more to cover the extra support they require.
The alternatives are either:
Everyone else subsidises the extra development work required to support nonstandard browsers...
They simply don't support non standard browsers at all, which will make the (usually fairly technically ignorant) users of those browsers just think the site is broken.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Funny)
the mental disabilities that steer one to using particular browsers are not chosen.
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Should you be shopping on PCs you don't manage? If its work related, then I think they may allow for a browser upgrade to save a 6.8% fee. This is how you finally push businesses to start keeping up with progress. Are they still stuck on XP? Well then download fucking Chrome/Opera/Firefox/Safari!
Public school systems in the USA require students to have certain vaccinations in order to enroll in the student-body. Is this fair? For the benefit of man-kind, vaccinate your children and educate the bastards. Its
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so don't set your user-agent string to 'super-wheelchair-fun-time' and enjoy the low prices the rest of us get????
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
By Ruslan Kogan's own admission, a mere 3% of his customers use IE7. If he's so wound up about how much time he's spending on that 3% then either he should be a businessman and just stop wasting time on it or stop being such a whiny bitch looking for free advertising by proxy.
If the customers in that 3% actually WARRANT the added work to support them, then this highwayman 6.8% tax wouldn't be considered because their commercial value covers the extra work.
Bottom line, the guy's a moron flogging a frankly stupid idea that is utterly indefensible from a philosophical standpoint and a total non-issue from a business standpoint.
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IE8 is a free upgrade available for all versions of windows that can run IE7.
I dare bet Microsoft itself would rather their IE7 users upgrade to IE8 as well.
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i also wish i didn't have to use stupid web-based apps that break if you use anything other than ie6/7 as part of my job and i could upgrade past 7 on my work pc.
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Depending on how "rich" the interface is you may not be able to pay at all....
Though I must admit it continues to amaze me how well lynx can display a lot of pages. I only use it in a bind but it has yet to fail me.
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>kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
About a dozen, several award winners. I've had projects included in the cover CD's of major Linux Magazines (more than once).
And your point is er... bullshit. The problem you cite only exists for people who don't play by the rules. If your code is free software you will never have to support any distribution but your own. You know why ? Because if it's good and users want it then other distributions will build and include
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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