Over the past several months, you may have noticed a warning message if you’ve accessed the NCBI site using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser:
This message has caused some concern among some users about exactly what changed on January 1, 2013 and whether or not they will still be able to access PubMed and other NCBI resources. We hope that this post will address some of the more common questions.
Why are you no longer supporting the IE7 web browser?
We consider several factors when deciding to stop support for a browser, such as how many of our web requests come from the browser, how much staff time is required to support the browser and the general level of support for the browser among other internet content providers.
What does “stop supporting this browser” mean?
When we stop supporting a given browser, we will no longer test new or updated web pages on that browser, and can no longer guarantee that the features on our web pages will work well or at all in the browser. Additionally, if we become aware of problems on our web pages that only occur only on that browser, we will no longer fix them.
What happened on the NCBI website on January 1, 2013?
Actually, nothing. We didn’t turn anything on or off. As described above, we simply will no longer test our pages or fix problems in IE7.
What does this really mean about my use of the NCBI website?
Practically this means that after January 1, IE7 users should still be able to use NCBI resources; however, as we update our pages, we expect that over a period of time (which could be weeks or months), the ability of IE7 to render our pages correctly will degrade.
What should I do?
The best course of action is to upgrade your browser to a more current version. Examples of the most current versions of browsers that we support are as follows:
For more information about Browser Support for the NCBI site, please see this page: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/browsers.