End of Support for Internet Explorer

AgilePoint NX is announcing the removal of support for Internet Explorer effective AgilePoint NX v8.0. Microsoft Edge is the path forward to use AgilePoint NX if you prefer, or are required, to use a Microsoft browser.

What is changing in terms of browser support?

Our current release in the market, AgilePoint NX v7.0 SU2.5, supports the latest two versions of Internet Explorer (IE), which are IE 10 and IE 11. The upcoming release of AgilePoint NX v8.0 will be aligned with Microsoft’s way forward and will not support Internet Explorer. Going forward, Microsoft recommends adoption of Edge browser, which provides backward compatibility with Internet Explorer 11.

Starting AgilePoint NX v8.0, if a person using Internet Explorer tries to browse to AgilePoint Portal, he will be shown a browser not supported message which prevents him from using the product.

What is the direction from Microsoft regarding browsers?

Microsoft announced plans to make Edge broadly available across more versions of Windows beyond Windows 10.

The last version of Internet Explorer (IE) was release by Microsoft in the year 2013. Microsoft stopped supporting the older version of Internet Explorer, IE 10, on Windows 7, 8.X and 10 on 12-Jan-2016 and IE 11 is running in a maintenance mode only. Over the last few years, Microsoft has been pushing enterprises and users to abandon the Internet Explorer browser and to adopt other modern alternatives, especially its home-grown alternative i.e. Edge browser.

In January 2020, Microsoft switched from its proprietary engine in Edge browser to a new opensource engine called Blink. Blink is part of the Chromium open source project. Thousands of developers and enterprises (such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Opera Software, Adobe Systems, Intel, IBM, Samsung and more) contribute to this project. This means the rendering engine in both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge is the same. Blink is also used in Opera, Brave and Amazon Silk browser.

What are the reasons behind this change and the way forward?

Internet Explorer no longer receives major updates adding the latest security and functionality that supports complex web apps like AgilePoint NX.

AgilePoint strives to deliver products that meet our customers’ needs. The increasing gap between Internet Explorer 11 and all other browsers has meant that we needed to expend considerable effort to avoid and fix defects that only appear in that browser. It limits our technology choices and dampens our ability to deliver the reliability and functionality our customers expect.

Moving away from Internet Explorer will give our users a much faster and modern user experience. It will also help reduce product development time and eliminate browser specific testing cycles. In a nutshell, the way forward is clear – Abandon Internet Explorer. This is not just a direction adopted by AgilePoint or a push from Microsoft, but the entire world has adopted modern browsers, which support so many new features. By adopting these new features, the product development team can bring in the next level of rich and modern user experience. The performance of the user interface will improve significantly.

Because only 1-2% of AgilePoint customers use Internet Explorer to access the product interface, we are removing support to concentrate our efforts on the latest browsers with the latest functionality, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge to benefit as many customers as possible.

What if a client still uses Internet Explorer and needs time to migrate?

Our current release in the market, AgilePoint NX v7.0 SU2.5, supports the latest two versions of Internet Explorer (IE), which are IE 10 and IE 11 and will continue to be supported for another couple of years at least. Any customer who is still using legacy Internet Explorer 11 as a company wide standard can be supported using AgilePoint NX 7.0 SU2.5 till they are ready to migrate over to new browser.