First Kogan announces that all IE7 users will lumped with a 6.8% tax for using their website as supporting the older Microsoft browser increases cost of doing business for them. Yes its a cheap gimmick, but it makes a great point. Here at PhonesandPlans we too have struggled to provide a consistent user experience for IE7.

30% of visitors to phonesandplans.com.au use some version of IE. As this graph from our Analytics report shows, almost 9% of all IE users are on IE7. This works out to less than 3% of the total visitors, not much, but not insignificant either.

So if this PR stunt does help lower IE7 usage, you won’t hear us complaining!

The second piece of bad news impacts all IE users regardless of version. A zero-day flaw allows hackers to get into people’s GMail accounts using a vulnerability that has existed in IE since the beginning of time. It needs the user to navigate to a particular malicious website using IE to infect the computer and gain GMail access. Microsoft have provided a patch to block the infection.

No surprise then that Chrome is all set to take over IE to become the number 1 browser in the world.