Most people can agree that it's best to keep your browser (and all your other software) up-to-date. Yet some people, whether it's their choice or not, are still using old and outdated browsers.
These older browsers cost the end user (in the form of security) and the developer (in the time taken to develop for them) quite a bit.
Many companies have stopped supporting older browsers and some even display a notice that kindly prompts you to upgrade. But in a bold move we see Australian retail electronics website, Kogan, has chosen to still support the ageing Internet Explorer 7 browser but offset the additional development costs by having their IE7 using customers pay an IE7 Tax.
New browsers are always bringing us great security updates and other brilliant features and while we'd all like to spend less time developing for older browsers, it all comes down to the visitors of each website. You can't alienate your audience.
Kudos to Kogan though, as far as we can see they're the first to attach an actual financial tax on users of outdated browsers and we're curious to see how it plays out. Even if this is a PR stunt (possibly inspired by another web app that made a show of blocking IE users from registering) that has already gotten a lot of coverage.
Read their announcement here.
Image copyright Kogan.com
Posted by: Rick
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