At Lexity we bounced everybody who wasn't using IE8 or better to a page that showed them how to upgrade, and specifically encouraged Chrome Frame for those who were stuck with IE6 or IE7. This was very simple to do; all it took was a few conditional comments:<p><a href="http://blog.lexity.com/blog/2011/12/27/browser-not-supported-one-year-later.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.lexity.com/blog/2011/12/27/browser-not-supported...</a>
An interesting idea, but I can't help but think there's a better way to phrase it.<p>For instance, they could automatically impose the tax but then offer a discount for switching browsers. That's more of a win for everyone involved. For the shopper, they aren't treated poorly, but they're moved towards a better browsing experience and they stop being a burden on the internet. For Kogan they can still impose their "tax" without alienating customers.<p>As it reads right now, it's rather condescending. I do get that they're probably being intentionally provocative to impress an entirely separate audience, but if you were to take the idea seriously I think there would be better ways to pull it off.
I can't help but feel there's a better way to "make the Internet a better place". While it's not ideal customers are using IE7, belittling them and taxing because they might not know better seems a little extreme. The message reads more like developers venting their frustration supporting IE7 rather than trying to make things better.
I think it's cute but it's hard to get over the sense that it's the moral equivalent of "This site best viewed with frames at 1024x768 screen resolution with Netscape Navigator 2.0."
Ah; browser elitism continues to pervade the web platform. Perhaps one day developers will realize how to develop working pages for static, decade-old browsers. It's not as hard as bloggers evangelize it to be.<p>HTML and CSS gracefully degrade. Host objects (DOM, etc.) require some care, but can degrade as well.<p>On an open platform with open software, we continue to punish and castigate users for their choice (or lack thereof) of environment. How infuriating is it for a user that's stuck on IE < 8 at work because of paranoid sysadmins?<p>Moreover, version detection is moronic. Twitter does this by banishing IE 6 users to a "mobile site" because the "desktop site" is poorly written. Browsing in IE 5 yields a broken version of the "desktop site" (CSS and all).
Honestly more sites should do something like this (maybe a little less prohibitive and a bit more informational). I think most users with old browsers are on them because they don't know about the faults of that browser or the alternatives. Making the alternatives so obvious may do some good, and shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to the user.
I think Kogan has already stopped supporting IE7 because IE7 hangs if you do visit!<p>To be clear: I wanted to see this amusing "tax notice" first hand, but when I visit kogan.com using Internet Explorer 7.0 with all default settings using a Windows XP/SP3 system, it shows the front page but it then hangs.
Nice move, there is no reasonable excuse to still be using IE7. If your IT department is forcing it on you they are just being slack + it's a consumer website so you probably shouldn't be shopping at work anyway.
> Microsoft itself has worked hard to persuade users to upgrade as part of general system patches, and as we’ve noted recently, the current Internet Explorer 9 release performs much better than you might think.<p>Is IE9 available for Windows XP? Most of the corporates still rely on Windows XP machines. I can't help thinking Microsoft's persuading people to get IE9 is just another try to get them out of Windows XP. And while there's ample reason to move on from IE7, there isn't any so many for upgrading from Windows XP, really.
Ah, flashback! Or just don't support IE at all (and call it a feature!): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941799" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941799</a>