By 3 News online staff
An Australian retail website has begun charging a "tax" on shoppers who use Internet Explorer 7 instead of a more modern, up-to-date web browser.
Kogan.com sells electronic appliances such as TVs, computers and phones. Chief executive Ruslan Kogan says he introduced the 6.8 percent surcharge on IE7 users to recoup time and costs involved in making his website render properly on the nearly six-year-old browser.
Only 3 percent of visitors to kogan.com use IE7, but it was consuming all of the IT department's time and resources.
"I was constantly on the line to my web team," he told the BBC. "The amount of work and effort involved in making our website look normal on IE7 equalled the combined time of designing for Chrome, Safari and Firefox."
Mr Kogan settled on 6.8 percent as it was 0.1 percent for every month since IE7 was released. Microsoft has since released two newer versions of Internet Explorer.
"It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the internet economy millions," he says.
He doesn't expect anyone to pay the tax, since it can be avoided by simply downloading a newer browser.
The campaign against IE7 resembles the one against IE6, the previous version of the browser that went virtually unchanged from its release in 2001 through to IE7's release in 2006, ignoring innovations made by rival Firefox and Opera browsers in the meantime.
A decade on, even Microsoft was celebrating IE6's long overdue demise.
3 News