Australian Company taxes customers using IE7

No one really cares about IE6 anymore, and apparently some are feeling the same way about IE7. Australian electronics retailer Kogan implemented the world’s first “Internet Explorer 7 Tax.” Kogan states that anyone purchasing a product from their online store using IE7 will receive and additional 6.8% tax. A large warning on the Kogan website warns IE7 users:
“It appears your system administrator has been in a coma for over 5 years and you are still using Internet Explorer 7. To help make the Internet a better place, you will be charged 6.8% tax on your purchase from kogan.com. This is necessary due to the amount of time required to make web pages appear correctly in IE7.”
At the bottom of the warning they have a link to download better browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Facebook’s Timeline also announced they were dropping support for IE7 back in December of 2011.
So for you browser novices out there, why the disdain for IE7? Without getting into the spefics, it renders CSS differently than other browsers, so in order for sites to look right in IE7 web developers spend a ridiculous amount of time building workarounds, polyfills, javascript back-ups and alternate style sheets just for that one, specific browser…that’s why all developers hate IE7. There’s really no excuse for still using IE7, a six-year-old browser that cannot auto-update the way Chrome, Safari, and Firefox will do.