An Australian electronics retailer has decided to start charging customers who still use Internet Explorer 7, the five-year-old browser that is the default on machines running Windows Vista and peaked at 46 per cent of the browser market in 2008.

Kogan is instituting the "tax" at 0.1 per cent for every month IE7 has been released, meaning it currently stands at 6.8 per cent. Using the New Statesman's patented time machines (Windows XP computers), it appears that the plan has not yet been implemented, but the company says that when it is switched on, it will display the above message.

The company says:

It is early days yet, but we have had a lot of tweets and emails from people in the IT and web community praising us for what we have done. Anyone who is involved with the internet and web technology would know the amount of time that is wasted to support all these antiquated browsers. You have to make all these work-arounds all the time to make sure the site works properly on it.

They claim the key reason for doing so is the expense of continuing to support IE7:

We have not done the exact maths, but it is a significant amount. The front end of every screen has to get redeveloped every time in order to render properly in IE7. It's not only costing us a huge amount, it's affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the internet economy millions of dollars.

Kogan is no stranger to unusual pricing. In 2010, they rolled out "LivePrice", which let people pay less the earlier in the production process they ordered a new product.