DeskDirector Blog

Important update on Internet Explorer

Written by Catalina Ramirez | June 27, 2018

We are freezing development for Internet Explorer. This means that in the coming months new features will be targeted for the modern evergreen browsers like Edge, Chrome and FireFox. Your users will have a great experience on Edge, Chrome and FireFox, the Windows client and the Mac client. Users can continue using Internet Explorer 11 but 'mileage will vary' and the experience will slowly degrade.

You expect us to bring the best experience to users when they use DD Portal. To achieve this we use many modern HTML innovations that Internet Explorer does not natively support. For some time we have been building special patches for our web clients especially for Internet Explorer. This is needed because Internet Explorer does not support many of the modern HTML conventions. This development overhead not only makes releases slower but also increases the technical debt in the product. In short, full support of Internet Explorer would mean less development in the future.

Older versions like Internet Explorer 10 and earlier are not supported. Users will see a message saying their browser is not compatible. 

DD Portal on IE 11 will still support all ticketing functionality and learning center, and will also support DD Forms; It will however not include notifications, broadcast, or chat.

Internet Explorer has had a long and successful life as an enterprise workhorse. It's usage on the Web has been dwarfed by Chrome and FireFox but it is still a force 'behind the firewall'. Inside large enterprises IE often runs ageing legacy apps. To do so IE must continue to support deprecated technologies like ActiveX and legacy HTML semantics. The accommodation of older technology has precluded IE adopting newer HTML markup and rendering.

Microsoft recommends Edge over IE wherever possible for these reasons.

So we have decided to freeze the IE version in a stable state, and will not update it further. This freeze will take place after we release our new ticket UI, and it will only support basic functionality. We will not be making any updates unless it is a fix for issues related to the basic functionality.

If you have any questions, please log a ticket at our support portal.