Microsoft officially ended support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) on June 15, 2022. In light of this, Shorthand intends to end IE11 specific development and testing from August 1, 2022.
Shorthand’s ability to deliver beautiful and engaging storytelling to audiences around the world relies on performant, robust, and secure web browsers built to modern web standards.
However IE11 has diverged significantly from modern web standards over many years, and has seen only incremental improvements since its 2013 release. It simply doesn’t provide the security, performance or features required for modern web browsing. Moreover, Microsoft’s freeze on any new bug fixes or security patches from June 15, 2022 means it’s increasingly vulnerable to security exploits, and makes it impossible for our team to resolve any problems in IE11 browsers.
As at January 2022, 0.42% of Shorthand stories were viewed using IE11. At this time we decided to extend support for an additional six months. However by June 2022 that number had dropped to just 0.09%, prompting the call to end IE11 support.
Our decision to end IE11 specific development and testing will enable us to focus on optimising your stories for the 99.9% of readers (and growing) that are using modern web browsers, and to ensure we can continue innovating the Shorthand product.
No action is required by you.
Stories published prior to August 1, 2022 should still work in IE11 as they currently do. Any stories published or republished after this date are not likely to work or display as intended in IE11 browsers.
Over the next few months Microsoft will be progressively redirecting IE users to their modern browser.
View our current supported devices and browser list.
If you have any questions or concerns how ending IE11 support might affect your organisation, please do get in touch with us.