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 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. 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.
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. 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.
Supporting 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, with a consistent MIDAS experience between browsers. Users should 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. The challenge primarily has been 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. Essentially, the web has developed and evolved significantly over the years we’ve been developing MIDAS, yet 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. We’ve already 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. 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.
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!
You may have seen articles recently on other websites and blogs claiming that as from today, 12th January 2016, Microsoft will end support for all versions of Internet Explorer, except for IE 11.
According to Microsoft’s corporate vice-president for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, speaking at last week’s BUILD developer conference in San Francisco; “Most of the web wasn’t designed for touch, but users still expect it to just work“. An example given was that navigation and interaction within web pages or web apps often relies on “mouseovers”. This is where hovering the mouse over a particular region causes a menu or tooltip to open. The natural behavior for users with a touch screen is to tap the area. This is usually translated into a “click” event rather than a “hover” action, or if they tap and hold, seen as a “right click” event.
In other highly exciting(!) Firefox news, their logo has undergone a redesigned:
