Good bIE old friend
Once upon a time, Internet Explorer was the greatest web browser in all the land. But how times have changed, IE is no longer the prettiest girl at the party. 😊
We’ll be putting Internet Explorer out to pasture (ending support) on June 1, 2019.
Why the change?
Basically, very few people still use Internet Explorer and it now has unpatched security vulnerabilities. Supporting IE takes a lot of our time so we will be ending support for IE so that we can focus on adding new features.
The gritty details
A security researcher notified Microsoft of a vulnerability on March 27 that allows hackers to steal information from your computer when using IE, at this point Microsoft has said they will fix this but they haven’t committed to a date. The more worrying aspect is that in just over eight months support for Windows 7 ends and so there will be no more security fixes for IE after January 14, 2020.
Given this we’ve been reviewing usage of UCare and noticed a significant drop in usage of Internet Explorer (IE) over the last year. UCare only supports IE 11 as the only version Microsoft still supports. But usage of IE 11 has dropped this year. IE is now being used by less than 0.5% of people (1 in 200 people), if we look at just people who have UCare access the number drops even further too just over 0.2% (1 in 500 people).
Here’s the real kicker though, we spend a significantly larger percentage of time testing UCare to ensure it works in IE, and even more time fixing issues that only affect IE. This is valuable time that could be going into simplifying UCare and creating new solutions that better fit our customer’s needs. For instance our engineering team is currently working on new functionality related to service planning and getting it to work in IE has been challenging and very time consuming.
Because IE is ancient in internet land (over six years old) it also limits the technologies that we can use which means that some aspects of UCare can’t take advantage of the faster and simpler options that are available in modern web browsers.
While still available; IE has actually been depreciated by Microsoft on Windows 10 and replaced with a newer browser called Edge. Which means that Windows 7 and 8.1 are the only operating systems that people are likely to be using IE on.
The good news is that all of the people still using IE can move to Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, an additional benefit is that Edge will soon be using the same underlying technology as Chrome (which is a cousin of the technology in Safari). This will cut down our testing even more so that we mainly need to test for Chrome, Safari and Firefox, giving our team more time to focus on adding value.
We know this isn't much time but we want to roll out new services related functions that IE is holding up, also given the small number of people still on IE we are hopeful that they can make the change without too much fuss.
What to expect
If you are using IE then you will soon start to see a notification that support for IE is ending. After June 1 this change will be permanent and UCare may no longer work for the few remaining people who are still using it. The notification will be permanent at this point.
With these changes we’re working hard to make UCare easier to use, if you have any feedback we’d love to hear from you, simply email support@ucarehq.com. Also, if we can be of assistance with this transition please let us know, were here to help.
