Ditch IE7 and we'll give you a FREE COMPUTER, says incautious US firm

Internet Explorer 7 holdouts are being offered a brand new computer by a US company sick of working to support Microsoft's legacy browser.

Before you get too excited, you must be a customer of the company.

Following a new website launch, NursingJobs.us has determined it is cheaper to buy each customer using IE7 a brand new computer running a “modern” browser rather than making its slick new site IE7 compatible.

NursingJobs has also told users they'll get a better experience using their new site, which has been revamped for mobile and tablets.

The site apologized to those still using IE7 for the fact its new jobs board doesn’t render properly in their browser.

IE 7 is seven years old. It runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Microsoft will stop providing extended support for Windows XP on April 8 this year. Extended support for Windows Vista finishes in 2017.

The company is a recruitment site for nurses and medical employers, based in Microsoft’s home state of Washington.

“Some of our clients are still stuck with IE7 so we decided to make a bold offer, one that initially seemed crazy to us but now makes a lot of sense,” the site said here.

“We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7. We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware.”

NursingJobs.us reckons IE7 makes up 1.22 per cent of its traffic.

Microsoft released IE7 in 2006 and it uses Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine, which was updated by Microsoft in IE7 to become vaguely more compatible with web standards on CSS.

However, it came before Microsoft really got serious on standards in IE8. That browser introduced a mode for viewing web sites rendered using Microsoft’s architecture and a separate mode that complied with web standards. It’s improved since then. ®