

Ask HN: Why doesn't Google release Chrome for Windows 2K? - grandalf

It would seem that doing so would offer significant competitive advantage to Google:<p>1) it would allow lots of people with low end hardware to be able to run a very fast, standards compliant browser on the Windows platform.<p>2) it would put pressure on MS to backport IE9, and if MS did so it would hurt Windows sales.<p>3) Win2K lacks the same level of copy protection as newer versions of Windows, and is very widespread in the 3rd world.<p>So does anyone have any speculation (or first hand knowledge) about why this hasn't happened?
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stretchwithme
More importantly, why ain't there an OS/2 version? This is Google's chance to
pressure IBM into resurrecting Web Exploder.

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Detrus
Strategy and development priorities. By the time they reach significant
penetration, that Win2K audience will be smaller. If they spend a lot of
effort supporting old systems now, they'll have less resources for making
Chrome better on modern OSs, which will slow down HTML5 and hurt penetration.

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clark-kent
My experience is that Windows XP is more popular around the world than Win 2k.
I don't remember Win 2k ever being mainstream. Windows 98 was the more popular
option before XP.

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ndl
Google is aiming into the future. Targeting legacy systems can be a great way
to solve customer pain and get easy users, but it's usually not a long term
growth strategy.

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Raphael
It's open source. Go nuts with your defunct platforms.

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brudgers
Microsoft isn't even porting IE9 to XP, so I doubt Chrome for Win2k would
cause them panic.

