A New LockDown Browser (ie. it’s not IE)

Updated November 9, 2015

For the past 10 years the Windows version of LockDown Browser relied on Internet Explorer as its underlying engine. Nearly 100 million online exams have been taken with this version of the browser, so it’s served us well.

But we aren’t a nostalgic bunch at Respondus. When we saw that a better browser experience could be created with Chromium – the open source framework for Google Chrome -- we decided to make the jump.

Chromium is fast, and stable. And it doesn’t have the same (well...) problems that sometimes occur with Internet Explorer. But the big advantage (the really big advantage) is that Chromium is open source. This means we can troubleshoot issues by actually looking at the code. Crazy, huh?  This also gives us additional freedom to develop new features. The often-used phrase “if only I had access to the code” has now been banned from developer meetings. Because now we do.

The Chromium-based version of LockDown Browser was recently released and is the only version available for new installations. We immediately noticed a lower rate of support issues with the new version of the browser, and we expect that will only continue to improve. Also in the coming months, we will be phasing out the older version of LockDown Browser which is based on Internet Explorer. Stay tuned.