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Kogan imposes a tax on IE7 shoppers
- bradgessler 14y agoIf you sell a B2B product, there is a higher willingness for the customer to pay this tax since they are probably working at a large enterprise.
- cheeze 14y agoI like it. Sure, alienating your customers is bad, but in a case where these customers may be costing you money, might as well push them to upgrade.
- budgieking 14y agoYeah as much as it could be a pr stunt, there is so much wasted time/money in legacy compatibility development. One contract I had blew out by 2 months (making total dev time 3.5 months) in IE6/7 modifications.
- litek 14y agoThis is terrific link bait. They've probably checked their stats and figured the exposure is well worth the few missed sales they might encounter.
- jacobr 14y agoSo it's blogspam from LifeHacker linking to Kogan's linkbait...
- planetguy 14y agoYeah, it's a way to flatter the rest of your customer base, who now get to feel superior for using a different browser. "Hey everybody, I use Chrome, aren't I wonderful?" Further suggestions to let us elite middle-class types feel superior to others: 1. Extra 25% surcharge for anyone who shows up at your cafe wearing Crocs 2. Anyone driving up to your hotel in a Pontiac Aztek has to pay a fifty-dollar uglification fee 3. If a fat person shows up at your store, employ a security guard to stand around going "Ha ha! Fatty fat fat fat" until they leave.
- ktizo 14y agoI guess the major economic difference is all those suggestions would lose you money, whereas this will probably help their sales while slightly cutting their costs.
- phoboslab 14y agoBad analogies. It would be reasonable to charge extra for anyone who enters a shop with a beautiful wooden floor wearing spikes on their shoes. Spikes induce extra maintenance costs - so does IE7.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoNo, that's ridiculous. This is like taxing the disabled because they cost more money.
- epmatsw 14y agoThat's equally ridiculous. Not upgrading your browser is a choice, being disabled is not.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoNot really. Most people using IE7 probably didn't choose it, their IT department chose for them.
- nasmorn 14y agoTrue but if there was some department disabling people, we would look very differently at disabilities I guess.
- kamjam 14y agoI've seen many banks that have legacy systems what ONLY work in IE6, so they can't upgrade until they apps are re-written, but those apps are so big they don't want to touch it or they have some longer term project to replace this, blah blah. Some crap littered with ActiveX plugins no doubt. I know HSBC have (what appears to me anyway) to be like this. But yes, agree the work/personal related thing, they can easily buy at home and if the workplace has such an antiquated attitude to these things then they probably also have your internet access to watch and lock down anyway.
- lukevdp 14y agoyep - this sort of PR is nothing new for Kogan either
- mkmcdonald 14y agoThe "development time" metric is superfluous nonsense perpetrated by lazy, loud-mouthed developers. Here's a baseless graph that John Resig of jQuery fame included years ago in a speaking session: http://i.imgur.com/1OOcg.png http://i.imgur.com/1OOcg.png. Developers are inundated with "ugh; IE sux" propaganda, but the complaints are rarely quantified beyond "my site breaks in IE".
- mschalle 14y agoHonestly more sites should do something like this (maybe a little less prohibitive and a bit more informational). I think most users with old browsers are on them because they don't know about the faults of that browser or the alternatives. Making the alternatives so obvious may do some good, and shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to the user.
- guruparan18 14y agoIs it me, or others also not seeing it? In IE6, the IE7 tax is not applied. Wondering why they would have left IE6.
- cdeonier 14y agoI can't help but feel there's a better way to "make the Internet a better place". While it's not ideal customers are using IE7, belittling them and taxing because they might not know better seems a little extreme. The message reads more like developers venting their frustration supporting IE7 rather than trying to make things better.
- g4 14y agoThere might be nicer ways (for the user) to do it, but each of these ways requires a lot of time and money. IE should really be picking up after itself and assisting users on the legacy systems to update their browsers. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it's Government and Corporate organizations that use old legacy systems from the fear of what might happen if they tried to upgrade and migrate their legacy computer networks.
- coopdog 14y agoI think it's fair enough. Consumers who can't be bothered upgrading are costing Kogan money by frustrating their developers (assuming good dev/designers are now giving preference to jobs that don't require supporting ie7) It may actually be costing Kogan money overall by driving away some consumers, but no doubt they've done the sums and think the goodwill from the tech crowd and marketing will outweigh that
- dedward 14y agoBlame the customer? Yeah, that works. This is badly worded - no question. I'm no lawyer, but I imagine there may be some law about actually calling it a "tax" - tax tends to imply something imposed by the government. They are of course free to charge whatever surcharges or discounts they want..... A smarter move would simply to have notified the customers upon hitting the site that their browser is incompatible with the site and that they could switch to some others that are more compatable. Telling them you are going to charge them more is absurd - either you're going to support Ie7, or you aren't. Really weird marketing move either way...
- 14y ago
- kentbrew 14y agoAt Lexity we bounced everybody who wasn't using IE8 or better to a page that showed them how to upgrade, and specifically encouraged Chrome Frame for those who were stuck with IE6 or IE7. This was very simple to do; all it took was a few conditional comments: http://blog.lexity.com/blog/2011/12/27/browser-not-supported-one-year-later.html http://blog.lexity.com/blog/2011/12/27/browser-not-supported...
- DanBC 14y agoI can understand why you make the requirements for your app very clear. I cannot understand why you'd chose to bounce potential customers from your website based on their browser. Isn't this just you failing to provide information to people who have made an effort to contact you and ask for it? I ask this next question gently: Have you checked you're not bouncing people using assistive technology?
- kentbrew 14y agoSpeaking only on my own behalf and not as part of Lexity, for whom I no longer work, I'd have to say that I'm fine with the risk of losing business from people who are unwilling or unable to update from a seven-year-old browser, "assistive" or not. Sorry to sound short about this, but it's the same sort of thing that happens when a road turns into a freeway. For everyone's safety, you don't get to ride your bicycle.
- ceol 14y agoI doubt their userbase using IE7 is large enough for this to be a big deal. This tax's real goal is PR for Kogan.
- josephcooney 14y agoKogan seem to be very good at attracting attention like this.
- frankydp 14y agoMaybe not for Kogan, but most of the DOD is still on IE6, as an example that is something like 2 million daily users. Uber large business and government is were the users are hiding. The reason the numbers are still off is because those same users are using chrome at there house in the evening. There should be a business only metric for browser usage. That would be very interesting.
- Kaizyn 14y agoNo, DoD switched from IE6 several years ago.
- mayneack 14y agoMany government offices now have firefox too. Not sure about the ones with higher security concerns, but I know the normal security places have FF.
- bmelton 14y agoAnd to be fair, the divisions in which we're talking about high levels of security aren't using those browsers on the internet anyway, they're locked away in SCIFFs, accessing internal-only applications.
- MrVitaliy 14y ago> Maybe not for Kogan, but most of the DOD is still on IE6, as an example that is something like 2 million daily users. With each passing day, this statement made less and less sense to a point of absurd. And that point has been reached a long time ago. I work for Department of Interior (the armpit when compared to DOD) and here its either fully patched IE8, latest Firefox or you are booted off of network. Can DOD be really that archaic and still allow employees to browse wild wild web with IE6?
- vbrendel 14y agoAh, flashback! Or just don't support IE at all (and call it a feature!): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941799 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941799
- marshray 14y agoI think it's cute but it's hard to get over the sense that it's the moral equivalent of "This site best viewed with frames at 1024x768 screen resolution with Netscape Navigator 2.0."
- zem 14y agonow that the world has moved on from the two-browser days, and we actually have some standards in place, there's a huge difference between "only this idiosyncratic browser" and "anything but this noncompliant browser".
- marshray 14y agoSo then just design and test with the compliant browsers and let IE users figure it out for themselves. If just a fraction of the sites had done that back during the browser wars then IE would have become a compliant browser.
- zem 14y agonot really - during the browser wars, ie had such a large share of the market that if you didn't support it, your site was considered broken, not the browser.
- marshray 14y agoYes, everybody used that logic back then and it became self-fulfilling. There were a few Mac users back then too. At one time they were influential enough that Microsoft had developed a port of IE to Mac.
- rbanffy 14y agoThey'd rather build a port than risk having Mac users demanding compatibility with their competitor.
- jlarocco 14y ago
- overgard 14y agoAn interesting idea, but I can't help but think there's a better way to phrase it. For instance, they could automatically impose the tax but then offer a discount for switching browsers. That's more of a win for everyone involved. For the shopper, they aren't treated poorly, but they're moved towards a better browsing experience and they stop being a burden on the internet. For Kogan they can still impose their "tax" without alienating customers. As it reads right now, it's rather condescending. I do get that they're probably being intentionally provocative to impress an entirely separate audience, but if you were to take the idea seriously I think there would be better ways to pull it off.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cristianocd 14y agoPR, link bait or whatever you think about it... you gotta agree it sure is a fun way to promote change.
- themenace 14y agoI think Kogan has already stopped supporting IE7 because IE7 hangs if you do visit! To be clear: I wanted to see this amusing "tax notice" first hand, but when I visit kogan.com using Internet Explorer 7.0 with all default settings using a Windows XP/SP3 system, it shows the front page but it then hangs.
- EGreg 14y agoI see IE9 is missing in that list :)
- peetahb 14y agoAnd not a fuck was given :)
- acuity12 14y agobrilliant.
- mkmcdonald 14y agoAh; browser elitism continues to pervade the web platform. Perhaps one day developers will realize how to develop working pages for static, decade-old browsers. It's not as hard as bloggers evangelize it to be. HTML and CSS gracefully degrade. Host objects (DOM, etc.) require some care, but can degrade as well. On an open platform with open software, we continue to punish and castigate users for their choice (or lack thereof) of environment. How infuriating is it for a user that's stuck on IE < 8 at work because of paranoid sysadmins? Moreover, version detection is moronic. Twitter does this by banishing IE 6 users to a "mobile site" because the "desktop site" is poorly written. Browsing in IE 5 yields a broken version of the "desktop site" (CSS and all).
- billpatrianakos 14y agoWhile you may be right about browser elitism your tone suggests coder elitism. Yeah, we can often allow sites to degrade gracefully but the old web is dying. The days of static sites are almost totally behind us. We're entering a new era in development and sometimes supporting those old browsers is more trouble than it's worth. Penalizing users of older browsers gives them incentive to upgrade. It really is a win win situation. They get a better experience and we get another user. We can't support these old browsers forever. Ten years doesn't sound like much but on the web it's a lifetime. It's like suggesting reserving one lane of our highways for horse and buggies.
- mkmcdonald 14y agoI realize that a certain line must be drawn. However, a large subset of browsers can still be supported. I've found that I can support scripted pages until IE 4, wherein `throw` and `try/catch` are not supported. Niceties such as `Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty` and `Function.prototype.call` were introduced in IE 6⁰, so I can accept complaints about IE 5. A SyntaxError followed by a termination of script seem acceptable in that case. However, HTML and CSS should degrade fine in old browsers. I have no problems with presenting an acceptable page in IE 6 or Opera 5, even with their quirky float handling. We just don't work hard enough. ⁰ JScript version 5.5, which is implemented in IE 5.5 introduced these. Verson 5.6 was implemented in IE 6.
- shmerl 14y agohttp://www.0xdeadbeef.com/~blizzard/weblog-videos/2010-03-26-ie-is-mean/ie-is-being-mean-to-me.ogv http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/~blizzard/weblog-videos/2010-03-26...
- jamespcole2 14y agoNice move, there is no reasonable excuse to still be using IE7. If your IT department is forcing it on you they are just being slack + it's a consumer website so you probably shouldn't be shopping at work anyway.
- altrego99 14y agoKrogans are doing some really good things since Urdnot Wrex came into power.
- altrego99 14y ago> Microsoft itself has worked hard to persuade users to upgrade as part of general system patches, and as we’ve noted recently, the current Internet Explorer 9 release performs much better than you might think. Is IE9 available for Windows XP? Most of the corporates still rely on Windows XP machines. I can't help thinking Microsoft's persuading people to get IE9 is just another try to get them out of Windows XP. And while there's ample reason to move on from IE7, there isn't any so many for upgrading from Windows XP, really.
- welcomebrand 14y agoThey're so kerrrrazy I lol'ed. Good bit of free publicity I'm sure.
- notlostyet 14y agoWhy 6.8% specifically?
- ansgri 14y agoIt is written. "0.1% for each month since the browser was released"
- anhdo 14y agoKogan really has a nice way to educate people to choose a better browser, but I think this will hurt his image a little bit.
- seivan 14y agoWhat about a discount if you use other browsers instead? Wouldn't that be a better encouragement to have people switch?
- joeblau 14y agoI'm surprised there isn't some JavaScript library service that notifies users that their browser is outdated.