Saturday 16 June 2012

Slightly off topic - IE7 Tax

The beginning of the end

For Internet Explorer 7

Australian retailer Kogan.com recently had their website revamped. But instead of using all the latest technologies to make the website better, they found that the web development team were spending a lot of time and money making the website IE7 compatible.
This lead to them imposing a tax of 6.8% for people making purchases using the antique browser.

This is in-line with my views of out-of-date technologies as I outlined in my first blog post, where I stated that the framework I plan to build will not try hard at all to be backwards compatible with old technologies. I am pondering if I should include a pop-up for users of old browser suggesting they download a newer one.

Something I find amusing is that the pop-up on the site warning of the tax doesn't suggest IE9. Just Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

You can find out the percentage of people using browser at the w3schools site. At the time of posting, only 2.1% of people use IE7. There is also a group of people campaining against the use of IE6 over at ie6countdown.com . While we're on the subject of IE6, it may be worth noting that Google stopped actively supporting IE6 in 2010.

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