From 1st September 2020, Meet & Engage will no longer guarantee our products will work on Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 and will not provide support for clients continuing to use these platforms. To understand our rationale, please read on.

Back in the annals of time, Microsoft produced the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser and bundled it in with their operating systems with the intent to win the browser wars from Netscape. It pretty much succeeded, with IE enjoying a 95% market share in the early 2000s. Microsoft continued to release a new version every few years.

Unfortunately, new versions of the browser handled web functionality differently to their antecedents, and those antecedents failed to support new web features. This required developers to produce different versions of their website code to support these different browsers. Additionally, Microsoft tied each release to a version of the Windows operating system. This all resulted in increased development time and costs and was generally regarded by all web developers as a pretty dumb idea.

Unfortunately, this browser release process also required users to manually update their browser to a new version, which they often failed to do resulting in users, especially corporate users, continuing to run old browsers, which required ongoing support. This was the case for pretty much every website and web application in the world. Microsoft finally woke up to this huge global issue and followed the lead of Firefox, Chrome and Safari by developing a browser that could be incrementally and, more importantly, automatically updated. This browser is known as Microsoft Edge.

At Meet & Engage, we’ve continued support for these older browsers but, mostly due to security issues and the tiny user base they now have, we have finally called time. The benefits of this approach to our clients are largely hidden in security and performance improvements, but it also allows us greater flexibility to improve the user interface and experience for you and your participants. It also means our developers can spend more time developing exciting new features and products rather than spending time making things work for these older browsers. Happy developers, happy clients.

We will continue to support the final version of the Explorer range of browsers, Internet Explorer 11, for as long as Microsoft does, at which time, if not long before, all users will need to switch to the Microsoft ‘Edge’ browser (or a competitor).