Website Design Nottingham and Browser Choice

I read a BBC news article today that made me smile and applaud the initiative of the on-line shopping company Kogan. They have instigated a tax on customers to their site using Internet Explorer 7.
Click for the full article.

In 2 recent Net Quality Website Design Nottingham articles Small Business Website Designs and Browser Wars where we shared a brief history of the choice of Internet browsers and Small Business Websites and Browser Choice, where we outlined methods of measuring the usage share of the dominant Internet browsers and the problems leading to over or under estimating the usage share statistics, the browser Internet Explorer is shown to be heavily featured.

As a player in the Internet browser market, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer became the dominant browser during the late 1990’s. It continued to increasingly lead the market share resulting in a decline in the innovation and development of browsers until its supremacy started to be challenged by other open-source and free browsers in 2003. As a guide, new releases of Internet Explorer were presented to the market roughly every 1 or 2 years, however after release 6 in 2001, release 7 was not made available until late 2007.

Release 7 included bug fixes and enhancements to its support for web standards, but in my opinion it still lacked the overall support and correct rendering that other Internet browsers offered. As a result, Microsoft continued its development of their flagship browser, and Release 8 was unleashed in 2009.

As a Nottingham based website designer, I pride myself that all our Internet website designs look great and function perfectly in all of the main browsers. This includes the older releases, and our procedures state to test all of our website designs in browsers going back to Release 7 of Internet Explorer. However accommodating these legacy releases does impose an additional overhead on the development of our Small Business website designs. I have frequently experienced the joy of completing an Internet site and then the frustration of discovering additional work is required to the website design to get it to function properly in these older browser releases.

Kogan have decided upon a novel solution to the problem. They continue to make their website available to these older legacy browsers, but have imposed a tax on all transactions made using Internet Explorer 7. I think this is brilliant - they are not blocking access to their business for older browser users, but they are making the point that they are paying increased development costs to allow this. Kogan’s Chief Executive has explained that he wanted to recoup the time and costs involved in “rendering the website in an antique browser”

Even the amount of the tax makes a point and backs up the action by Kogan - the charge is 6.8% of the total transaction value. This represents 0.1% for every month since the launch of Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006 and so the length of time since the release is clearly seen to be 68 months (justifying the quote of “antique browser”)

We will not be increasing the prices for website designs in Nottingham and our commitment to quality will still ensure your business website will look great and function perfectly in all browsers. However I do congratulate Kogan on finding a way to make the point and bring to people’s attention the difficulties in web design for older browsers. Contact us today to see how our small business website designs can help your business stand out from the competition…on ALL major browsers…