While most of you are surely using the latest customized version of Firefox or Chrome to read this post, there are still a handful of people who not only continue to browse the Internet with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but with outdated versions of IE. Thus, one Australian electronics retailer Kogan has decided to impose a tax on customers who apparently refuse to upgrade their browsers.

“We’ve implemented the world’s first ‘Internet Explorer 7 Tax’,” reads an announcement on the Kogan website from earlier this week. “The new 6.8% tax comes into effect today on all products purchased from Kogan.com by anyone still insistent on using the antique browser.”

The company says customers’ insistence on using the outdated browser is holding it back from providing the best service for everyone:

One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge – that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market.

Customers can avoid the tax by simply upgrading to something that wasn’t released when people still watched Desperate Housewives.

“As Internet citizens, we all have a responsibility to make the Internet a better place,” explains Kogan. “By taking these measures, we are doing our bit.”

Out of curiosity, I took a look at how many Consumerist readers are using IE7. Turns out only about 16% of our visitors use any version of IE and only 12% of those visitors are using version 7. So fewer than two out of every 100 of you would be impacted by this “tax.”

[via RetailCustomerExperience.com]

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