Online retailer Ruslan Kogan is never short of a good stunt to promote his business. His latest, a tax on users of Internet Explorer 7 has given him worldwide attention.
Ruslan touches on a real problem for web designers, e-commerce shopkeepers and the online community in general – that Microsoft’s older versions of their Internet Explorer web browsers don’t conform with standards.
This means IE6 and 7 don’t display pages the way other browsers do meaning designers have to spend extra time catering for the people who won’t move to new versions.
For those who insist on using the older versions of Internet Explorer, they are also taking a risk as these products are far less secure than the newer editions.
It’s in everybody’s interests to have the latest browsers and security patches, so both Windows and Mac users should be making sure they have the latest updates on their computers.
Even with the latest updates, it’s worthwhile using a different web browser to the one that comes with the system. That’s why Opera, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome are the better options for web browsers.
Ruslan Kogan’s right in forcing users to move onto modern software, it’s a media stunt that might do some good.