The bold Australian retailer Kogan.com has recently introduced a tax on any of their site’s users who purchase one of their products using IE7.  Their reason for this is to recoup the time and costs involved in rendering their website for such an old browser.  So they’ve decided to charge 0.1% for every month since IE7 was launched.   
 

As you can imagine there’s a lot of controversy flying around about whether this is a good or a really bad move and we’re sure you already have your own thoughts.  But MMT Digital doesn’t think this is as black and white as it seems.  So, to join in with the conversation we thought we’d add our own thoughts to this blog so you can find our what we think to this brave move. 
 

Good idea?

Can you imagine a world in which everyone has the latest browser?  If you’re a developer I’m sure you think that would be an absolute dream.  If you’re not a developer you may be wondering what all the fuss is about.
 

Modern browsers are extremely powerful and allow users to do almost anything that was previously only possible outside the browser and they are far less vulnerable to security attacks.  However for the purpose of this blog I’d like to highlight that the reason developers want users to upgrade to more modern browsers is because they’d like to use more modern rendering techniques which enhance the users’ experience and in some cases are quicker to implement.  However, these newer rendering techniques are not always supported by older browsers, which means developers have to either compromise the original site design for all browsers or render the site slightly differently in each of the browsers. 
 

So in short upgrading to newer versions of your browser is beneficial to you as a user and to developers who want to make your experience as good as it can possibly be. 
 

Bad idea?

We’ve established that upgrading your browser is never a bad idea, but is it right to charge people who use older browsers? 
 

As a digital agency that has experience working with large public sector clients we know that for some companies and organisations it can take time and a lot of resource to upgrade browsers across enormous IT infrastructures.  So there are many users out there who actually can’t upgrade their browsers; should these people be penalised?
 

What does MMT Digital think?

Okay so we definitely don’t recommend charging users with older browsers to use any of our company websites and we definitely won’t be recommending this approach to any of our clients; especially those in the public sector.  However we do believe in encouraging users to upgrade their browsers (when possible) because MMT Digital believes in great user experience and we want everyone who visits the sites we’ve built to enjoy their experience.