Category: Tech Insight

MIDAS and Internet Explorer 11

Here are MIDAS HQ we love getting feedback from our customers! Whether positive or critical, all feedback is important to us. Feedback helps us to continually develop and improve our MIDAS room booking & resource scheduling software and service.

Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive. In fact, you can read some of these comments on our website. We’re also on independent review sites such as TrustPilot too.

However, in recent times a handful of customers have commented that they perceive the MIDAS user interface (UI) a little “dated”.

We wanted to begin addressing this for our next MIDAS update. For v4.20 we’ve introduced a number of changes and improvements in this area. You can read about these changes in this blog post.

But it’s also useful to explain some of the challenges we’ve faced with regards to the UI over the years.

Ensuring maximum browser compatibility

As you may or may not know, MIDAS has been in continuous active development for well over a decade. Our philosophy has always been to support ALL popular web browsers. That includes Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Apple Safari, and more recently Microsoft Edge.

Room Booking System for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and EdgeSupporting all these browsers has been an enormous task over the years. But we feel strongly that our users should have a choice of which web browser they use. We’ve been committed to ensuring a consistent MIDAS experience across browsers. We believe users shouldn’t forced to use one particular browser in order to use our MIDAS software.

Slow development of Internet Explorer

It’s fair to say that the most difficult web browser to maintain support for over the years continues to be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The challenge has primarily been because IE has always lagged way behind all other vendor’s browser offerings in terms of its development, updates, and support for the latest standards. Essentially, the web has developed and evolved significantly over the years we’ve been developing MIDAS. Yet over this period, Internet Explorer hasn’t kept up.

To some extent we’ve been “held back” over the years by our decision to continue to support customers who force their uses to use Internet Explorer. However, as of today the only version of Internet Explorer we officially support is 11. We’ve already deprecated support for IE10 & 9, IE8, IE7, and IE6 over the past decade.

MIDAS and Internet Explorer 11Continuing to support MIDAS in IE11 for the very small (and ever decreasing) percentage of our users who continue to use this old browser, limits how we can develop MIDAS, particularly in terms of the user interface.

The demise of Internet Explorer 11

Whilst we would have loved to have dropped IE11 support long ago, Microsoft continue to support IE11. They have committed to providing mainstream support for IE11 until the end of life of the operating systems upon which it’s installed. This includes Windows 7, 8 and 10. Windows 7 & 8 have both now reached their EOL (End Of Life) for mainstream support. Windows 10 however is still actively supported by Microsoft and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (for a minimum of at least two years).

That’s why we’ve taken the difficult – but necessary – decision that at some point during 2019 we’ll officially be dropping IE11 support in MIDAS.

This won’t necessarily mean that MIDAS will suddenly cease to function for IE11 users next year. But it does mean that over time new features and new user interface elements and enhancements may not display or – even function correctly – if you continue to access MIDAS using Internet Explorer 11.

Migrating from Internet Explorer

If you’re currently an IE11 user, there is however, plenty of time to switch to a different web browser. There’s also plenty of choice when it comes to modern alternative web browsers.

MIDAS will continue to be supported in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Opera.

We appreciate that this may affect a very small number of users. However, we hope this post gives some insight and understanding as to why we’re making this decision. We’re also confident that this will give you plenty of time to switch to an alternative, more modern, web browser.

If you have any questions or concerns over how this may impact you and your organization’s use of MIDAS, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Our friendly team will be only too happy to help!


Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

May 2018 has been a busy month here at MIDAS HQ!

Not only have we migrated Certificate Authorities, we’ve also been testing a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) feature in MIDAS.

What does a CDN do?

To explain what a CDN does, imagine viewing a photograph online. That image will be stored on a web server somewhere. Say you’re in the UK and the server where the image resides is located in Australia. It will take your browser longer to establish a connection and retrieve the image from the other side of the world than if the server was located in the same country as you. Now, we may only be talking of a few fractions of a second longer, but if you’re viewing a web page containing several photographs, that can soon add up!

A Content Delivery Network vastly improves performance. It achieves this by storing (or “caching”) a copy of the original photograph on multiple servers all around the world. Then, when a viewer requests the photograph, the CDN serves a cached copy from whichever server is geographically closest to the viewer. This greatly improves the load time for the viewer. It also reduces the load on the original server, as the photograph is served from the CDN “cache” instead.

As a CDN “caches” a source file/web page, it is only suitable for “static” content which doesn’t change frequently, for example, images, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, downloads, etc). “Dynamic” content – content which changes frequently/upon each visit – must still be served directly from the origin server, rather than via the CDN.

CDN Support in MIDAS

In MIDAS v4.18 we unofficially introduced support for serving static resources from a CDN (Cloudflare). This has been automatically enabled for all MIDAS trials and for all new cloud-hosted customers since the start of April. Since then, we’ve been closely monitoring its impact and effectiveness.

Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN)

As our CDN trials proved effective and exceeded our expectations, throughout May we’ve been engaged in a phased roll-out of the CDN for remaining cloud-hosted customers. We’re pleased to announce that all cloud-hosted MIDAS systems now have CDN support enabled.

We’re currently seeing nearly 90% of all requests for static resources being served directly from Cloudflare’s global CDN network. This has led to performance improvements and reduction in load times of customer’s hosted MIDAS systems of between 13% – 67%!

We’re sure you’ll appreciate these performance improvements. They’re part of our ongoing commitment to provide the best possible service for our customers! …and we’ve more improvements and enhancements in the pipeline too!


Certificate Authority Migration – May 2018

Let's EncryptThroughout May we’ve been migrating our domain’s security certificates. We’ve transitioned from certificates issued by GlobalSign to ones issued by Let’s Encrypt instead.

What Is A Security Certificate?

In essence, a security certificate is what allows you to connect to a website over a secure https connection (instead of traditional, insecure, http). A valid and strong security certificate is what ensures that the connection and traffic between your web browser and the website/service you’re using is encrypted.

What Is A Certificate Authority?

Put simply, a “Certificate Authority” (or CA for short) is an organization responsible for issuing and revoking security certificates. Popular CA’s include Comodo, Symantec, GoDaddy, and GlobalSign to name but a few.

Which Domains Are Affected?

All mid.as domains and *.mid.as sub domains (including our cloud-hosted customer’s domains).

Why Is This Happening?

Our security certificates were due for renewal in June. As part of our continuous commitment to provide visitors to our site and customers alike with the best possible experience, we took the opportunity to review who provides our security certificates. Let’s Encrypt provide HTTPS certificates to over 70 million domains. Switching to certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt allows us to simplify and automate the management of security certificates across our expanding MIDAS network.

Will I Notice Anything Different?

In short, no!

In order to migrate our CA from GlobalSign to Let’s Encrypt, we needed to remove the previous GlobalSign (AlphaSSL) certificate from each *.mid.as domain and install a new Let’s Encrypt certificate in its place. We have being doing this in a phased transition for all *.mid.as domains during the course of May. We’re pleased to report that this transition to Let’s Encrypt is now fully completed.

Here’s how the old and new certificate issuers now look for our *.mid.as domains:

CA Migration to Let's Encrypt
Migrating to Let’s Encrypt

We’d also like to reassure hosted customers that no domains, URLs, or IP addresses have changed as a result of this CA migration.

If you experience any issues or have any concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to help!

A note for cloud-hosted API users

Whilst unlikely, you may initially receive a certificate warning/error when making API calls. This will depend upon your code and development platform/language. Now that the security certificate for your dedicated *.mid.as sub domain has changed, it may temporarily prevent your code/app from working until you accept the new security certificate.

Also, in some rare cases, you may not be able to access the API if your platform/device is listed as incompatible in Let’s Encrypt’s certificate compatibility list.

Finally, please be aware that Let’s Encrypt issues auto-renewing certificates which are valid for fixed periods of 90 days.


Upgrading our servers to support HTTP/2

Network Switch

As part of our ongoing commitment to the services we provide to our “cloud hosted” customers, we’ll shortly be upgrading our client servers to support HTTP/2.

HTTP/2 is the first major new version of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for two decades. It will eventually replace the previous HTTP/1.1 protocol which was standardized way back in 1997.

The primary goal of HTTP/2 is to overcome many of the shortcomings of the twenty-year old HTTP/1.1 protocol, particularly in relation to how content is delivered over the internet.

HTTP/2 focuses on optimizing the communication and flow of content between web servers and web browsers. When a user connects to a web site, their browser negotiates an HTTP session with the server. The type of session created will vary depending on the features supported by the browser and the server. If both ends support the latest HTTP/2 protocol, the server uses the HTTP/2 protocol to shape and optimize traffic before it passes through the network back to the browser.

Once the browser and server agree to use HTTP/2, they can utilize additional features such as compression and multiplexing to optimize the connection. If either the web server or the user’s web browser doesn’t support HTTP/2, the connection will fall back to the HTTP/1.1 protocol.

Benefits of HTTP/2

One of the main improvements over HTTP/1.1 is that HTTP/2 uses simultaneous connections (or multiplexing). Previously only one resource can be fetched from the server at a time. However with HTTP/2 multiple resources can be fetched over a single connection concurrently.

Another benefit is header optimization. Every request over HTTP contains header information. With HTTP/1.1, many of these headers are repeated over a single session. HTTP/2 removes redundant headers while compressing the remaining headers, leading to performance improvements.

Benefits to cloud-hosted MIDAS users

In terms of MIDAS, the benefit of our client servers supporting HTTP/2 is that users will see notable improvements in page load speed and responsiveness when using MIDAS.

In our pre-testing, we saw page load times via HTTP/2 improve by some 20% over the same pages loaded via HTTP/1.1

When will the upgrade happen?

We’ll be upgrading our client servers to support HTTP/2 over the coming weekend (15/16th July 2017). Other than a quick server restart, no additional downtime is expected. For more information, check our dedicated Service Status site (which already supports HTTP/2!), and follow us on Twitter for updates.

Will I need to do anything?

No action is required on your part!

If you’re running a modern operating system and web browser, you won’t need to do anything. Your browser will already support HTTP/2, and you’ll still access MIDAS in exactly the same way. Once our servers are HTTP/2 enabled over the weekend, your browser will adjust accordingly.

If you’re not running an HTTP/2 compliant browser/operating system don’t worry, you’ll still be able to connect to your hosted MIDAS system over HTTP/1.1 as before. For an improved MIDAS experience though, you may like to consider upgrading your operating system & browser to one that supports HTTP/2.

  • Edge Chrome Firefox Current versions of Edge, Chrome, and Firefox browsers fully support HTTP/2.
  • Safari Current versions of Safari support HTTP/2 on OSX 10.11+
  • Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 11+ supports HTTP/2 on Windows 10 only

UPDATE: Our network is now fully HTTP/2 enabled, and we’re seeing some great performance improvements too!