NOTE: This article has been updated.  The latest content is available at pasUNITY Modern Browser Support

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pasUNITY has always strived to provide the most secure experience for the widest range of customers. 

We monitor traffic to our pasPortal and other web-based applications to see what types and versions of browsers and operating systems our customers are using.  This information is useful to us because it tells us when our customers adopt and/or deprecate operating systems and browsers.  This in turn lets us know when we can start developing enhancements to pasPortal that take advantage of new browser features and when we can stop supporting legacy browsers.

The official policy for browser support at pasUNITY has always been that we support the latest version of popular HTML5 browsers (such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Edge) but the fact is that we try real hard to support older versions of those browsers too.  We know that some organizations cannot always upgrade to the latest browser in order to remain compatible with legacy in-house systems.  While technically Internet Explorer 11 is the only supported version of Internet Explorer the fact remains that version 7 on up has actually been largely compatibile with our products for quite a long time.

There does come a time, however, when continuing to support old browsers begins to present a security risk and that is the ultimate criteria for when we discontinue support for legacy browsers.  Due to vulnerabilities in the SSL 3.0 protocol and RC4 ciphers we disabled them last year and as a result many legacy browsers became incompatible entirerly.  Recently we disabled the 3DES cipher, MD5 hash, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange effectively terminating compatibility for Internet Explorer 8 and many other browsers.  We will never hesitate to cut off support for any old browser if supporting it puts our infrastructure at risk.

The image below shows the result of the latest security scan performed against our pasPortal infrastructure.  We are quite proud to carry an A rating and still be able to support nearly every browser made in the last eight years.


You can run this scan for yourself @ anytime by clicking here.  You might even want to run this scan against some of your favorite sites (or even your corporate sites) - you might be surprised at just how safe some of them are.

There also comes a time when we break compatibility with legacy browsers just to allow us to build a better product.  In the not-to-distant future we will be upgrading our applications to use jQuery 3.x which only supports Internet Explorer 9 and above and all modern HTML5 browsers.  The result will be a more responsive experience with a smaller footprint.  We had held off on this decision for a while in order to continue supporting Internet Explorer 7-8 but now that Internet Explorer 8 has been disabled due to security concerns and Internet Explorer 7 usage is less than 1 percent the time seems right to make the jump.  If your organization (or home users) are still on these old browser please start upgrading now.

We hope you find this article informative and welcome your feedback via the pasPortal web application.  Watch this blog for more information and timing on future infrastructure changes.