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)
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: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:Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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?
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.
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:economy of scale (Score:2, Insightful)
No. At some point there will be so few people using IE7 that they will stop supporting it.
Re:Erm... (Score:0, 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?
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
Re:Erm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you on your main point however: Philosophically, this sucks.
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:economy of scale (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Semantics (Score:3, Insightful)
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, Insightful)
Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
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.
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.
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: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).
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.
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: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.
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?
Re:Erm... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Erm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fragmented web standards are nothing new either, suck it up and roll with it. I don't bill my clients a higher rate just because a new law came into force that makes my industry more complicated - what makes some script kiddy with a copy of Dreamweaver and a PDF W3C certificate so goddamn special?
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
As we all know time is money and a business person willing to waste time makes no money.
Rather buying from developers wiling to waste time and pretending they care more about your uses, you should be supporting the developers that care about making a better more convenient enviorment for all users and web developers alike and who are more concerned with saving you money.
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: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.
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.