Internet Explorer has effectively lost the battle of browsers as Chrome has superseded it to take the position of the top online browser and the popularity of Mozilla Firefox is also steadily rising. However, IE, specifically IE 7, which is a very heavy and rather outdated browser, continues to be used by many users. It appears now that some retailers don’t want their users using IE 7 anymore.

Ruslan Kogan is a very well-known name in Australia. He is the pioneer of online retail in Australia and is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the region. Currently, he heads Kogan.com which is a huge retailer of consumer electronics and has sales of well above $100 million a year!

The interesting thing about Kogan is that he is outright candid and speaks his heart out, whatever the issue be. This may have also played a huge role in making him such a successful entrepreneur. Now, Kogan has come out with his stark dislike for Microsoft’s IE7 and has announced that such users who make purchases from Kogan.com using the browser will be charged an addition tax, something which he calls the world’s first ‘Internet Explorer 7 Tax.’

And it is no nominal amount. The users making purchases using IE7 will be billed an additional 6.8 percent tax on all their products. Putting his personal dislike of the browser aside, Kogan’s logic is simple, “The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined. One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge – that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market.”

This is an interesting take since Internet Explorer, indeed, has been left far behind when it comes to competitiveness of a browser. And it is more of a strain for online web developers to try and make their pages compatible with this old player. According to Kogan, the browser is costing millions of dollars to the online economics and users must update from it to better browsers.

Kogan is rather hopeful with this move when he says, “This will help us increase our efficiency, help keep prices for all smart shoppers down, and hopefully help eradicate the world of the pain in the rear that is IE7!”

Source: Kogan Blog

Courtesy: TechCrunch

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