Taxing the use of Internet Explorer 7
Jeff Horwich: Do you constantly ignore that pop up message telling you to update your web browser? An online retailer in Australia plans to put a kind of tax on customers who shop using outdated browsers.
Here’s Stuart Cohen from Sydney.
Stuart Cohen: Australian electronics retailer, Kogan.com, plans to charge an extra 6.8 percent to customers who shop on the site using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. Company owner Ruslan Kogan came up the bizarre number by adding 0.1 percent for every month since the browser came out 68 months ago. He says it’s costing a fortune to keep the site compatible with such old technology.
Ruslan Kogan: It takes just as much time to make a page appear properly in Internet Explorer 7 as it does to make it appear in every other browser. So we’re doubling up on all our web creativity and web work.
Kogan says he’s heard from other businesses who say they may try the same thing.
Kogan: We’ve got the resources to code our website in a way that it appears properly in every other browser. But, there’s a lot of websites that haven’t even thought about Internet Explorer 7. You know, we’re improving the way that the Internet works.
Kogan says he doesn’t expect many people to actually pay the tax. His site offers links to help customers update their browser and avoid the extra charge.
In Sydney, I’m Stuart Cohen for Marketplace.
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