For some time now we have been discussing in what scenarios we would eventually drop support for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), our discussions have mainly revolved around the small percentage of Brightpearl customers who use it and the amount of work that goes into developing for IE7.
That time has come for the development team here, so as of now Brightpearl customers are encouraged not to use IE7.
We are already feeling that the extra load has been lifted from our shoulders only a few days on. When support for IE6 was dropped it enabled us to progress onto much bigger and better things. Our departure from IE7 support will enable us to grow into the future faster and provide a better overall product for our customers. If you're interested in finding out why this is, please read the related section at the end of this document.
What this means if you use IE7
Stopping support for IE7 doesn't necessarily stop anything in Brightpearl from working, it simply serves as a notice that functionality or display fixes are no longer worked on for that browser. If we see an issue in Brightpearl we will replicate it, discover the cause, develop a fix, check the fix works and then fully test the fix across our browser testing suite (10 browsers across three Operating Systems in total). We will no longer be doing this for IE7, so there are no guarantees that pages will function and display correctly into the future as we develop new features and enhance existing ones.
Note: This does not affect the e-commerce platform provided by Brightpearl, this has always supported a wide range of browsers and will continue to do so.
What do I need to do?
If you use IE7 then you have a number of choices:
Upgrade your browser to at least IE8, but preferably IE9 if you can. You should experience a better Brightpearl and hopefully everything else on the web too.
Switch to another browser: Internet Explorer is not the fastest or most secure browser on the market, which means things can only get better if you switch to another browser. We love using Firefox here at Brightpearl because it's a great browser but also because of all the great add-ons you can install. Many employees and customers use Google Chrome – it is far and away the most popular browser because it's so fast and easy to use.
Stay put and wait until you start to see things not working for you. This is obviously the riskiest strategy, but if you just can't upgrade or change right now then plan to as soon as possible.
The reasons for the drop of support
IE7 is an old browser in the context of the web. It was released in October 2006 and there have been two major IE browser versions since then: IE8 in March 2009 and IE9 in March 2011.
Microsoft released both IE8 & 9 as replacements to the outdated IE7 browser; they feature better support for HTML5 (the language delivered to your browser) and CSS (the styling language used to display the page) which enables us to deliver much more features to our customers. IE9 specifically is a much more modern browser which is not only much faster but more powerful when it comes to running Javascript which is normally we use to: calculate your input before sending to the server, send data to the server asynchronously (think of the spinning loading image), trigger certain actions at the right time and to display visual transitions on the page. All of this with more power and speed means a better experience delivered to you faster.
IE7 also has a large number of programming flaws which mean that us web developers have to work very hard to ensure that our customers don't end up getting a raw deal when they use IE7. Occasionally they slip through the net and we find out about them very quickly, we put a great deal of resources into fixing them quickly.
Overall, we end up spending a good proportion of our time across support, development and testing to ensure that Brightpearl works as well in IE7 as it does in the other browsers. That may be all well and good until you consider that we spend more time working on fixes for IE7 than we do for all the other 10 browsers in our testing suite put together.
IE7 usage statistics have been dropping off for a long time, they have been around 2% for some time and in December they dropped below 1%. So the decision not to continue to spend so much time working around IE7's flaws when so few of our customers use the browser was a simple one to make.
If you still need convincing of our reasons to drop IE7 support then consider this; the more time that we spend patching Brightpearl for older browsers the less time we get to spend enhancing, improving and releasing features for our customers.
