Benefitfocus is committed to developing web applications that take advantage of current technology. Our engineering teams seek to make use of new capabilities available in current and supported versions of browsers in order to make our platform more secure and the functionality as robust as it was designed to be. As a result, Benefitfocus has made the decision to only continue supporting browsers that provide better security and performance for users of the BENEFITFOCUS® Platform.
As of January 12, 2016, Microsoft will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), and states that customers using IE8, IE9 or IE10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to IE11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. (Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx)
With that said, beginning with the June 2015 release, Benefitfocus will no longer support Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 8. We hope over the last year you have started and/or finished upgrading to a newer version of IE. If not, we recommend that you consider IE11 since it provides a crucial new feature called Enterprise Mode.
Microsoft states this regarding Enterprise Mode: "Many customers identify web app compatibility as a significant cost to upgrading because web apps need to be tested and upgraded before adopting a new browser. The improved compatibility provided by Enterprise Mode can help give customers confidence to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer. In particular, Internet Explorer 11 lets customers benefit from modern web standards, increased performance, improved security, and better reliability." (Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn640687.aspx)
Enterprise Mode, unlike the Compatibility View/Mode of IE8-IE10, offers a centralized preference control of the browser-rendering engine through a managed IT group policy. This new option makes it easier for IT teams to create a policy governing which internal legacy application URLs should run in Enterprise Mode (IE8 mode). As a result, enabling external sites and applications, like Benefitfocus, to leverage the faster and more secure IE11 runtime. To download the latest version of IE, please go to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads.
Why are we sun setting before January 2016? We have determined that performance issues may be amplified with IE8 as compared to IE9 and above. Additionally, we found that IE8 is unstable on Windows 7 (with certain IT setups) compared to Windows XP.
Benefitfocus is committed to meeting the demands of our clients by making our interfaces responsive on a variety of hardware and software. Unfortunately, IE8 out of the box does not support this interface user experience without additional third party libraries, which libraries inhibit responsiveness on IE8. IE9 and higher has built-in support for this interface development trend.
What this means is that in most instances, the application will continue to render and function as designed, and Benefitfocus will continue to support the Benefitfocus application. However, in the event of any errors caused by the use of a Benefitfocus or licensor non-supported web browser, Benefitfocus may not be capable of remediating any errors caused by the browser.
Alternatively, if your organization must depend on IE8 and cannot upgrade, we suggest you consider offering a dual-browser strategy, which should be easier for your IT teams to deploy. The Benefitfocus platform supports the following alternative browser options: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Please see https://www.benefitfocus.com/about/supported-browsers/ for more information.