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Comment by cdeonier | Hacker News Reader

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.

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There might be nicer ways (for the user) to do it, but each of these ways requires a lot of time and money. IE should really be picking up after itself and assisting users on the legacy systems to update their browsers. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it's Government and Corporate organizations that use old legacy systems from the fear of what might happen if they tried to upgrade and migrate their legacy computer networks.

I think it's fair enough. Consumers who can't be bothered upgrading are costing Kogan money by frustrating their developers (assuming good dev/designers are now giving preference to jobs that don't require supporting ie7)

It may actually be costing Kogan money overall by driving away some consumers, but no doubt they've done the sums and think the goodwill from the tech crowd and marketing will outweigh that

Blame the customer? Yeah, that works.

This is badly worded - no question. I'm no lawyer, but I imagine there may be some law about actually calling it a "tax" - tax tends to imply something imposed by the government. They are of course free to charge whatever surcharges or discounts they want.....

A smarter move would simply to have notified the customers upon hitting the site that their browser is incompatible with the site and that they could switch to some others that are more compatable. Telling them you are going to charge them more is absurd - either you're going to support Ie7, or you aren't.

Really weird marketing move either way...

Why is it so strange to pass the cost of supporting IE7 to IE7 users? If anything, I think business should be more effective at passing these costs to the specific consumers.

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