MANILA, Philippines — An Australian e-Commerce site is waging war against the aging Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft by slapping a tax on buyers who are still using the dated browser, stressing how better browsers are available for download today.
According to a report by the Australian news site news.com.au, online retailer Kogan has decided to impose a 6.8-percent tax on users of IE7, or “0.1 percent for each month IE7 has been on the market.”
CEO and founder Ruslan Kogan explained how the company is spending too much effort and resources in making the site compatible with IE7, a five-year-old browser, hence the fine.
He noted, however, that only about 3 percent of his site’s users are still using the browser.
“This is necessary due to the amount of time required to make the pages appear correctly in IE7,” said the notice that greeted users of Microsoft’s browser upon visiting the Kogan.com website.
To avoid the tax, the company suggested switching to “better” browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Opera, whose icons appear at the bottom of the notice.
Kogan said it is their contribution to making the Internet a better place.
Launched in 2006, IE7 was the first major update to Microsoft’s default browser in five years, succeeding the widely used IE6 that shipped with the ever-popular Windows XP operating system in the early 2000′s.
Despite the update, however, Microsoft’s IE browser remained buggy and highly vulnerable to malware attacks, prompting other companies such as Mozilla and Google to heavily promote their “safer” Web browsers.
IE7 was quickly superseded by IE8 in 2009 and IE9 in 2011. Statistics site W3Counter showed that Internet Explorer is still the most widely used browser out there with a 28.8 percent share, although this is broken down into the three major browser releases of late.
In terms of specific browser versions, however, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has the commanding lead at 14.40 percent, while Google’s Chrome follows at 13.61 percent share.
