A little bit of background, we\'ve made an electronic POS system for registered

Question

A little bit of background, we've made an electronic POS system for registered vendors of items of a well known brand. The vendors are required to login to use the system.

Recently, IE has been giving us lots of painful maintenance problems than before. Our boss is getting worried about running into further maintenance problems, so he has asked me to find out a way to automatically install & launch chrome if they try to login with any other browsers (For the record, nearly all of the issues are related to some feature working fine on FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari but doesn't on IE).

Let us put aside the ridiculousness of running an external .exe from Javascript, which is practically impossible (And rightfully, I told him so. But he insisted it was possible, so whatever).

So my questions are:

Is this request technically viable? Is there a guaranteed way to block requests from all browsers except for allowed ones?
Is this request reasonable? IMO, From the standpoint of users, limiting accessibility does more harm than good, but maintenance issue is definitely a valid business concern.
Has there ever been a case like this where other websites explicitly blocked certain browsers?
Edit: Thanks for the answers. We're supporting IE 7+ at the moment and indeed, 7/8 were the ones that caused most of the grief. Just dropping those two will make maintenance significantly easier but my boss thinks the problem has to do with IE itself, not necessarily the versions. I'm going to try to see if I can convince him, but I have a strong feeling he's going to stick by what he thinks.

Explanation / Answer

s this request technically viable?

No, not least because technical users will be able to spoof the requests - that said those users that are capable or walking round the limitations are more likely to be using a browser that doesn't cause you problems.

Is this request reasonable?

Maybe - but I refer to my earlier answer, the users that can easily change their browsers are unlikely to be the ones that are having problems.

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