Familiar sight?

At least for some of us EVWEB users this happens more often than it should. If you are using EMA’s EudraVigilance and EVWEB – Art 57 / XEVMPD tool to make the legally required product information updates, you might run into this pop-up and the following mandatory switch from a “real” browser like Chrome or Firefox to something called Internet Explorer.

The browser from the past

For the older generation, Internet Explorer is blast from the past. The almost original browser, that Microsoft used to steal the market from Netscape with adding a browser to their Windows 95. Some of us still remember the infamous antitrust legal battles in the EU. Even for the older generation, the period of using IE as the first-choice browser ended about 20 years ago.

The younger generation probably never used Internet Explorer for anything else than to download another browser (before the poor souls entered the working life.) Nowadays IE is mainly known for the memes.

However, when you start working with some serious and important systems, like EudraVigilance, you soon learn the lesson: Internet Explorer is the only browser that can be trusted to get the work done.

IE retirement in 2022

Seriously though, the requirement to use Internet Explorer for Article 57 database is ridiculous in the year 2021. According to Microsoft, they are finally retiring IE completely next year. Microsoft Edge with IE mode will replace the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application on Windows 10 (and 11). As a result, the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will go out of support and be retired on June 15, 2022 for certain versions of Windows 10.

What are EMA’s plans for XEVMPD when Internet Explorer is no longer supported? Who knows, but I hope that I will not have start using Microsoft Edge for the first time in my life.

The mandate to use a seriously outdated web browser is as good a sign as any of the need to modernize the world of pharmacovigilance; the quest we took on.