That actually does seem like a good idea...
And it doesn't have to stop with ancient browsers; just imagine:
What do you say to this?
World's first 'tax' on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7
- Thread starter trekkiedane
- Start date
That actually does seem like a good idea...
And it doesn't have to stop with ancient browsers; just imagine:
What do you say to this?
Good idea. 
Let's put a tax on everything you don't want people to be using. Guns. Alcohol. Salt. Red meat. Non-Apple products. Just pick a lobby and get it done that the competitor products are taxed.
Hence all the quotation marks both in my post and in the article and on the site in question (as far as I've understood the article anyways).
Actually it makes sense to tax these three if you have a public healthcare system. Denmark has e.g. a fat tax.
The main disadvantage of a public healthcare system is that it destroys like any insurance your incentive to take care of what you insured, even if it is your own health.
Via taxing anything that is related with this you can undo these disincentive effects partially. For the same reason you wanna subsidize stuff like fire extinguishers (respectively force any private player to follow certainly security standards).
Hmm...eventually this will give someone the idea to start charging for using current systems too and just label them under "site service fees."
Yeah
typical political construct; looks good on paper but doesn't translate to RL.Taxes on alcohol, tobacco, gasoline and cars do have the desired effect though, so I dunno
Which is equally silly. Their business is to sell products, and not to tell me what stuff I have to use in my life.
TrekBBS could come up with something similar. Charge everyone who's using IE7 a fee, otherwise they're only getting limited access to the forums.
They don't tell you what stuff to use in your life.
They just charge you for being a customer that insists on being more cumbersome to sell stuff to than other customers -I cannot see anything wrong with that.
As a matter of fact I, as a consumer, welcome it.
People seem to be missing the point.
In order to produce a commercial site that displays correctly in i.e 7 is costing the business more so it's simply passing on thecosts - just like any ofher business.
So it's not a tax.
Wouldn't it have been easier and cheaper all round for the site to just put a message up whenever someone with I.E. 7 visits saying "This site is not compatible with IE 7 and earlier"? That way his dev team doesn't have to waste any money/man hours on it? If the number of sales lost from this outweighs the money/manhours invested I don't see why they have a problem doing the work.
^You mean... *GASP* just be like everyone else.
I don't suppose it'd be possible for IE 7 users to fudge the User-Agent tag so as to fool this site into thinking the browser is different?
If this takes off it will soon be taken on board by megacorps and used for anti-trust purposes and to crush competition or force alternative progs off the net, to force monopolies.
It starts out as a seemingly good idea, but quickly gets turned to evil.
It starts out as a seemingly good idea, but quickly gets turned to evil.
It's a bit more complicated as these are natural monopolies. Like in the case of operating systems there are network effects in the case of internet browers, i.e. you gotta adapt your sites such that they match the most widely used browsers.
On the other hand this is not such a big issue today as back in the days when Netscape and the Internet Explorer competed with each other and in the case of software and operating systems there is also a trend towards making software platform independent.
I think these technological changes are preferable to socializing the respective natural monopolies although in the case of Google one could and should consider the latter.
Already been tried by Microsoft.
There are features from some of their software that won't work with non-Microsoft browsers and can extend depending o. what MS technologies are used.
All because Microsoft tried to extend the html standards with proprietory bits.
There is almost a contradiction in this. Firefox used to be fast. Now it is slow. Oh, yes it produces the pages correctly, but it just takes forever. When I had Firefox 3.6 on my old PC and dial-up, I had no problem with page load (512mb mem and 1ghz). Now with my laptop with its 2ghz proc and and 4gig mem with Firefox 11, it takes forever to load pages.
I use Internet Exploder just so they come up faster. They may not look the same, but they are at least readable.
I use Internet Exploder just so they come up faster. They may not look the same, but they are at least readable.