I fully understand about Windows XP. I'm disappointed about OS X 10.7 and 10.8, because many users with older (but still perfectly functional!) Mac hardware are stuck on those versions 4-5 years after their release because Apple won't extend support for newer OS X versions to that hardware. Apple also refuses to provide a way to upgrade a system to the maximum OS X version it supports; it's a huge hassle to do so.
It's not apathy or incompetence that means people are using these old OSes, usually it's that you can't upgrade (and the users don't have the money to upgrade the hardware). Windows 7 won't run on a typical XP machine due to lack of RAM and OSX 10.9 doesn't work on 32bit machines (pre 2007).
Halting support won't do much about this issue, people will just use vulnerable browser on these old vulnerable OSes because they can't afford a new(er) one.
A 10 year old computer ought to still be usable. Especially if you think about developing countries where often people can't afford new computers. Microsoft and Apple have failed the users and now Google is too.
Looks like I'll be moving my 6 year old son to Firefox on his perfectly functional educational model iMac which is stuck on 10.7. Shame, that.
> Starting April 2016, Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes.
Wouldn't it be better to stop functioning? Without security fixes, it will get hacked, and it would be better for everyone if compromised browsers weren't used.
Oh and they don't support CentOS 6 at all. That always annoyed me, its totally legit platform and much more useful for engineers than Windows XP is.
Is there still any reasonable way to upgrade from XP? I intended to upgrade to Windows 8 a few years ago on an ancient machine, only to find that Microsoft had eliminated the upgrade, and now you seem to need to buy a new copy of Windows for an old computer AND reinstall everything.
Seems unlikely most users will see this announcement. Would be nice if it is shown to them within the application if they are using the affected operating systems. Maybe put a notification bar across the top that can be dismissed but comes back each time it is launched.
Kudos to the Chrome team to support Windows XP so long after official EOL from Microsoft!
I think it's useful to keep in mind that the ideal number of platforms for a product to support is 1. Every additional platform makes it more difficult to ship new features and more expensive to maintain/support. Applications like Chrome ultimately make decisions about which platform they will support through the lens of:
1. number of users
2. PR (i.e. Linux support)> Posted by Marc Pawliger, Director of Engineering and Early Notifier
Can anyone explain the Early Notifier part of the title?
With the PosReady tweak XP will be around through 2019
But whew, just moved from XP to Windows 7 this week, I needed the memory for virtual machines for testing and didn't want to use the 64G hack because of instability.
I cannot describe how much I dislike Windows 7, everything simple in XP has been horribly mutated into something much less configurable and "dumbed down".
Classic Shell makes a dent but it is not enough.
Even the Cleartype tuning is a pain in the *ss on W7
Fortunately Firefox has made the change less painful, it looks virtually identical from XP to W7 because it has its own cleartype manager and is mostly independent from the OS otherwise.
I'm surprised that Windows Vista is included in this, since Microsoft will be supporting it through April of 2017, a year after this Chrome announcement takes effect.