
Updates to Chrome platform support - cleverjake
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-platform-support.html
======
kej
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.

~~~
praseodym
Vista's market share (1.77%) is a fraction of XP's (9.03%), so it's not that
weird to drop support for it as well.

Reference:
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers

~~~
Someone1234
Just want to add, that Wikipedia article uses statcounter as the source. If
you look at statcounter China is throwing off the data, it is running XP at
30%(!) Vs. USA @ 4.3%, UK @ 3.18%, France @ 4.8%, Australia+NZ @ 2.67-2.85%,
Japan @ 3%, et al.

My point is, that 10% figure is misleading. China is higher, everyone else is
lower.

~~~
Macuyiko
Yeah though good luck finding a pure Chrome install in China anyway. Most of
it runs this repackaged monstrosity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_Secure_Browser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_Secure_Browser)

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ivraatiems
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.

~~~
pornel
Looking at system requirements I don't see many models dropped between 10.8
and 10.9 (and 10.11 supports same models as 10.9).

Dropping of 10.7 cuts off machines from 2006. That'll be about 10 years of
support, which isn't too bad IMHO.

~~~
ivraatiems
It affects machines from later than '06: I have a mid-2007 silver Macbrook Pro
which allegedly should support 10.11, but which I can't actually upgrade past
10.7. Even getting it to 10.7 was a huge hassle because Apple doesn't make it
available anywhere.

~~~
twoodfin
I have one of the original (SSD even!) Macbook Airs from early 2008 that isn't
supported past 10.7.

I know it's a notoriously underpowered machine, but it still would have been
nice to get more than 4.5 years of supported OS updates. Still perfectly
functional as a portable secondary machine for mail, notes, terminal and light
Chrome browsing.

Apparently they didn't want to continue to support 32-bit EFI.

~~~
bsimpson
Incidentally, Google is promising Chrome releases for 5 years from shipping
for each Chromebook.

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rythie
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _A 10 year old computer ought to still be usable._

Usable maybe, updated with new OS updates though?

Those either costs money to develop (if we're talking point, security etc
updates to long dead OS versions), or stalls the development of new features
(if any new OS version must run in 10 year old PCs).

~~~
rythie
I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older
machines.

Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or
more easily. A 2006 Macbook had 512MB (upgradable to 2GB) and 1.8Ghz CPU,
which is not really much different to modern netbook.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on
> older machines._

Yes, but UI effects are just the tip of the iceberg of new features. Some
depend on the specific hardware capabilities (e.g. bluetooth being present, or
even specific version), others involve several components working in tandem
and depend on increased speed of later machines, others require specific
cpu/gpu support, etc.

> _Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years
> or more easily._

And all of these have 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less complexity, plus they're
not general purpose devices.

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alyandon
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.

~~~
btian
You should move to a supported OS to reduce chance of getting hacked.

~~~
alyandon
He is on a non-admin account and can only visit a few white listed sites that
I've pre-screened. The chances of him getting hacked are basically zero and I
don't have the money to replace a perfectly functional computer with a newer
one just so it can run a more recent version of OS X.

He also loves the built-in applications like Photo Booth that lets him record
own videos and apply silly special effects to send to the grandparents. So,
moving to Linux or Windows is really a non-starter.

~~~
travjones
My white MacBook was in the same boat. I still use it as a media computer, so
I formatted and installed Ubuntu Mate 15.04. If your son is just using the web
browser, I doubt he'll notice the difference in OSes. I don't know how old he
is, but it could be a fun weekend project for you guys.

~~~
alyandon
If it were just the web browser I would have probably moved him to some
incarnation of Ubuntu. Unfortunately, when it comes to applications like Photo
Booth that are easily approachable by a 6 year old the situation becomes more
complicated.

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azakai
> 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.

~~~
chimeracoder
That would just cause those users to switch to Firefox/IE/etc., which is not
what Google wants.

If they're still using unsupported platforms, there's a good chance it's
because upgrading is not a feasible option (at least not now/not easily).

~~~
ocdtrekkie
And people being forced to go to browsers that may have stopped getting
security fixes even earlier is worse. It's not like you can simply ban an OS
version from the Internet.

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
evmar
The Chrome team doesn't want to support multiple distinct Linux binaries, so
they drop older platforms once library versions skew enough to cause this.
(This page claims it's libstdc++:
[http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/](http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/) .) I
think the Chrome binaries are built on Debianish systems so it's always a
small miracle that the RPMs work anywhere.

(Why only support one binary? There's already a disproportionate
work_required/users_served ratio for Linux vs the non-Linux platforms even
with a single binary, and multiple binaries would mean multiple nonmatching
stacks in crash-catching and a more elaborate testing matrix. You can find
Chromium builds of the equivalent code that are built with the appropriate
toolchain for your platform anyway.)

Disclaimer: I worked on Linux Chrome many years ago, all of the above is just
guessing based on what was true back then.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Which makes total sense of course. However, if you're going to choose a
limited set of Linux distros to support, it seems like RHEL (and thus CentOS
and Fedora) would be a good choice. There are lots of companies paying money
for the supported version of those distributions and are compelled by
corporate security policies from upgrading various components to them at will.

~~~
evmar
In a joking-but-actually-kinda-not sense, the only justification for Linux
Chrome existing is so Google engineers test the websites they make in the
browser used by Google's users. So the only Chrome they really make is the one
that runs on the engineering workstations. (On the Linux team I liked to joke
that 80% of our users were coworkers.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sadly I can't install from the Goobuntu PPA server :-)

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three14
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.

~~~
oblio
I doubt it. I think the upgrade path is supposed to be XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 10.

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aljones
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.

~~~
justinschuh
That's exactly what we do. In this case it will start showing up in Chrome 48
with a link to the support page.

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therealmarv
Kudos to the Chrome team to support Windows XP so long after official EOL from
Microsoft!

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crabasa
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)

~~~
bad_user
That's the ideal for the provider, not the consumer. Nobody said that doing
business is easy.

~~~
chipperyman573
That's what he's saying. It's why number of users (something irrelevant to
other users) is important.

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okhudeira
> Posted by Marc Pawliger, Director of Engineering and _Early Notifier_

Can anyone explain the _Early Notifier_ part of the title?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Probably just a casual/unofficial title he grants himself for telling us with
some manner of advance notice.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, Google blogs often do things like this.

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ck2
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.

~~~
wnevets
You're really going to hate the switch to 8/10 when that's required in a few
years.

~~~
freehunter
Seriously, "Windows 7 is horrible compared to XP" is years behind the times.
Oh I remember the good old days of "Windows XP is Playskool, give me back
Windows 98!"

Wouldn't be an update year if there weren't people complaining about the
latest version of Windows, forgetting everyone had the same complaints about
the previous version of Windows that they love so much.

