IE11 No Longer Supported!

[anthony_sales1]

Although everything seemed to be working fine on Friday, I have come into work on Monday morning and discovered that IE11 is no longer supported by Canvas! And students and staff are unable to log in because IE11 is still the default browser used by the college. I suspect there are a very large number of users all over the world that are still using IE11, and even though I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few anomalies with the display etc, I don't understand why support has just been turned off without any notice (I have searched all updates notices and cannot find any reference to IE11). Gobsmacked...

Could we at least have an explanation as to why this decision was made and whether you actually bothered to consult any customers before pulling the plug...

OK I have now found an update from August 31st called Supported Browsers and if you follow the link it lists all the other browsers but IE11 - but it doesn't state anywhere that IE11 will no longer be supported - which should have at least warranted it's own headline - if a popular supported browser is having the plug pulled you don't just slyly remove it from the list of supported browsers and not notify anyone - this is very poor customer service...

[josephclaytonha]

IE11 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft, let alone Canvas. Development for any Internet Explorer was pulled by Microsoft in October 2016, and transferred to the Edge project. As frustrating as it is, I would highly recommend your college switching to Chrome- using an unsupported browser with no patches in 3 years is a massive security risk, and will undoubtedly slow down your operations. 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @anthony_sales1  Thank You for posting your question.  I'm not sure if you follow the Canvas Release Notes at all, but I did some searching in the Release Notes archive, and it looks like the announcement about IE 11 being unsupported was first announced back in May 2019: Canvas Release Notes (2019-05-11).  If you take a look at the Canvas Release Feature Archive document, you can view several Release Notes documents.  Starting with May 11, 2019 and then working your way to the current month, you'll find that most of the Release Notes, in some way, mention that IE 11 will not bu supported any more.  I'm not sure what your role is at your school, but I would recommend that your school's local Canvas administrators make sure they are following the Release Notes as they are published so that they can let the instructors (and maybe even your IT staff) know that changes like this are coming.  I know that doesn't really help your current situation...but I do hope that the information I've been able to provide you has helped to show that Instructure had made announcements about this as early as May 11, 2019.  Thanks.

[anthony_sales1]

Yep I have found them now - I read all of the Canvas update notification summaries and then read the full release notes if there is anything mentioned which might have an impact on our learners. None of the notifications I received mentioned IE11 explicitly or that the list of supported browsers was changing. I would expect a change of this significance to be explicitly flagged in big red letters at the top of an update notification. The fact that it wasn't even mentioned is gobsmacking, but to be honest doesn't really surprise me any more... To just suddenly turn off support for a still widely used browser isn't good customer service - even if it had a few glitches it was still usable. Our college is still using IE11 because in the UK Edge is not yet approved by Cyber Essentials, so we are not allowed to use it. So now it is the start of a new term and our students cannot access Canvas with the colleges default browser...

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi again,  @anthony_sales1 ...

I've not done the research on this myself, but based on a response I found from stefaniesanders‌ in problem accessing Canvas, she actually indicates that Microsoft is in the process of phasing out support of Internet Explorer.  Plus, there are security concerns with older versions of browsers, and so Instructure also has to keep that in mind.   @scottdennis ‌ also had recently replied to someone about browser security in a different topic, but I'm not able to find that posting right now.  I hope this additional information helps.

[anthony_sales1]

Yep I am sure there are issues with older browsers, but in the UK official advice is that Edge isn't secure either so we are stuck between a rock and a hard place - there is no indication that Canvas had any security concerns about IE11, it seems some elements were not working as expected and they decided to turn off support rather than fixing these issues. I just wonder how many people around the world are still using IE11? And no other major educational software provider has taken this same step - all the other paid systems we use continue to work perfectly fine in IE11... Seems to me they couldn't be bothered to fix it and used the age/status of IE11 as an excuse...

[scottdennis]

Hi Tony,

First of all, I want to thank you for being in the community and for taking the time to enter into discussion with people like Chris and myself.  

As for how many people will browse the Internet using IE I don't have good data on that.  However, a quick web search leads me to believe it is somewhere around 8%.  In preparation for Flash being discontinued in 2020, most software makers are switching to HTML5 for audio and video.  Out of the box, IE 11 cannot play HTML5 and Microsoft has no plans to change that.  For what it is worth none of the top four LMS companies using by a wide majority of educators now support IE at all.  

Kind regards,

SD