Here are MIDAS HQ we love getting feedback from our customers! Whether positive or critical, all feedback is important to us as it helps us to continually develop and improve our MIDAS room booking & resource scheduling software and service to make it the best it can be!
Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive, and you can read some of these comments on our website and also on independent review sites such as TrustPilot.
However, in recent times a handful of customers have commented specifically in relation to the user interface (UI) of MIDAS, which a few perceive as now a little “dated”.
We wanted to begin addressing this for our next MIDAS update, v4.20, and so we’ve introduced a number of changes and improvements in this area which you can read about in the following blog post.
However, we also thought it would be useful to explain some of the challenges we’ve faced with regards to the UI over the years.
As you may or may not know, MIDAS has been in continuous active development for well over a decade, and our philosophy has always been to support ALL popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Apple Safari, and more recently Microsoft Edge).
This 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, with a consistent MIDAS experience between browsers, and not be forced to use one particular browser in order to be able to access and use our MIDAS software.
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 series, primarily because it has always lagged way behind all other vendor’s browser offerings in terms of its development, updates, and support for the latest standards (the web has developed and evolved significantly over the years we’ve been developing MIDAS, and Internet Explorer doesn’t keep 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, having deprecated support for IE10 & 9, IE8, IE7, and IE6 over the past decade.
Continuing 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.
Whilst we would have loved to have dropped IE11 support long ago, Microsoft have committed to providing mainstream support for IE11 until the end of life of the operating systems upon which it is installed – namely, Windows 7, 8 and 10. Windows 7 & 8 have both now reached their EOL (End Of Life) for mainstream support, however Windows 10 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.
If you’re currently an IE11 user, there is however, plenty of time to switch to a different web browser and there’s 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, but we hope this blog post gives some insight and understanding as to why we’re making this decision and also gives you plenty of time to switch to an alternative, more modern, web browser.
As ever, 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 and our friendly team will be only too happy to help!