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Chrome Software Windows

Chrome To Drop Support For Windows 7 In 2023 (androidpolice.com) 53

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-the-line dept.
Chrome will no longer support Windows 7 nor Windows 8.1 upon the release of Chrome 110, currently scheduled to hit stable on February 7, 2023. From that point on, you'll need to be running at least Windows 10 to maintain access to new builds. Android Police reports: While Google won't be doing anything to stop users of older platforms from continuing to install and run earlier releases of Chrome, they'd be missing out on the latest critical security and usability enhancements.
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Chrome To Drop Support For Windows 7 In 2023 More

Chrome To Drop Support For Windows 7 In 2023

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  • Install Win10 to have Chrome (Score:4, Funny)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:01PM (#62997901) Homepage

    Nope, not happening. Maybe it will stop asking me to update it every few days, at least.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      I guess it's time to switch to Firefox, if you haven't already.

      • I guess it's time to switch to Firefox, if you haven't already.

        I use FireFox (ESR 102 to be exact). And firefox too will stop supporting Win7 and Win 8.1 The most likely scenario is that ESR 102 will be the version of Ffox with the longest windows 7 and 8.1 support available. Higher version will also support win7, but will receive security patches for shorter.

        You see, running a browser (any browser), a piece of software whose main function is to connect to the Internet all the time atop of an (insecure) OS that does not receive security patches is a "Bad Idea". And the

        • You see, running a browser (any browser), a piece of software whose main function is to connect to the Internet all the time atop of an (insecure) OS that does not receive security patches is a "Bad Idea".

          Whereas running software on an (insecure) OS that DOES receive security patches for its newly-discovered bugs is a "Good Idea"?

          The difference is which security bugs you're dealing with. All versions of Windows are insecure. Sometimes you know about the insecurities, sometimes you don't.

          • All software is insecure until proven otherwise. It's just a matter of finding the bugs to exploit.

            The one thing that definitely isn't secure is a program who's major functionality is to whore out it's user's data to every industry and group with deep enough pockets on earth. Which at this point is pretty much every major web browser, app, and OS on the market. There are a few replacements that aren't, but they are not mainstream knowledge, and their use requires adjustment and sacrifices that most are no

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by bobby ( 109046 )

            I take the same stance. I'd rather run a well-patched "older" OS. My main MS machine is still 7. I remember when Win7 came out there were so many patches the patch download volume dimmed the lights. Then 8, more tons of patches, and now with 10 you still need a main trunk line into AT&T's backbone to keep it updated. Will anyone ever fix most of that crap before they ship it? One can dream, right?

            I can't stand Chrome proper, but have been using Vivaldi a lot. If the 10 requirement forces me to st

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          The mindset also known as "you're stupid and I know what's good for you better than you".

          Mindset that gave us everything from mass starvation from Lyshenkoism to mass firing of New York staff for not getting vaccinated who're now getting full back pay and reinstated for being illegally terminated and everything in between.

          But this sort of people. As Fallout's motto goes, "they never change". This totalitarian bent doesn't go away just because previous iterations of its application put yet another nail in th

      • Firefox is good, and I'm using it, but it's actually time to switch to Win10+. Win7 is not supported anymore, it doesn't have security updates, and there is not much difference between win7 and win10 (or even win11, if your hardware supports it).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          I'd stick with 10 as long as you can. 11 has some problems, and I don't just mean the horrid new UI.

          It's been a long time since I've seen this Windows just outright crash or exhibit random instability, but it's become a regular thing with 11. It's like I'm running Windows 98 again. It crashed just a few days ago when I changed the wifi password, of all things, requiring a hard reboot. It randomly hangs for no discernible reason, sometimes for more than a minute, seemingly at random. For a while, playing

          • For me, win11 is as stable as win10. I'd suggest you to give win11 another chance with another hardware.
            Anyway, "Microsoft will continue to support at least one Windows 10 release until October 14, 2025".

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by narcc ( 412956 )

              I'm running it on a high-end laptop that's just over a year old. I'm not going to buy another computer just "to give Windows 11 another chance".

              I'm glad that you're not having any problems, but my complaints are hardly unique. Windows 11 seems to be absolutely loaded with problems. From the bizarre delay opening the context menu to the random short freezes, it's clear that it wasn't even close to ready for launch. It's not like users were clamoring for a new version of Windows, so I have no idea why the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      What if it's like Steam and updates itself to a version that doesn't work? That happened to me on macOS - Steam updated itself to a version that wouldn't run at all on the OS version I had.

      • I totally expect this to happen. All the games I bought for my Windows 7 box will become inaccessible because Steam won't support Windows 7 anymore. The whole crap sandwich is definitely why I'm not buying games for Windows anymore. I just reached my limit of BS from M$. I won't install any version of Windows past Windows 7. In my context, there really isn't any reason left to keep upgrading Windows. I have a Win7 box I RDP to over the open Internet. When it gets Pwn'd, I'll quit using Windows altogether. A

  • Doesn't make any sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:09PM (#62997921)

    What exactly changed in the application model in Win10/Win11 that would make Chrome unable to run under Win7? Seems like Chrome is just going to do an OS check and fail on Win7 for arbitrary reasons.

    • What exactly changed in the application model in Win10/Win11 that would make Chrome unable to run under Win7? Seems like Chrome is just going to do an OS check and fail on Win7 for arbitrary reasons.

      Exactly. I have Lotus 123 and WordPro from SmartSuite 9.8, from 2002, installed on my Windows 10 system and they run fine, with the exception of their help files, which rely on something MS deprecated in Win 10.

      • What exactly changed in the application model in Win10/Win11 that would make Chrome unable to run under Win7? Seems like Chrome is just going to do an OS check and fail on Win7 for arbitrary reasons.

        Exactly. I have Lotus 123 and WordPro from SmartSuite 9.8, from 2002, installed on my Windows 10 system and they run fine, with the exception of their help files, which rely on something MS deprecated in Win 10.

        Actually, you are exactly quoting the reverse case. You are running insecure unpatched applications on top of an (insecure) OS that is still receiving actual security patches. You example is anologous to say that you will keep running Chrome 106 (the last one made for Win7 and Win8.1) in win 10 and Win11 because the programming model has not changed, and the retrocompatibility in windows is so good ;-)

        From 2023 onwards, both support for win8.1 AND extended/expesive support for Win7 (not meant for us peasant

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe they're going to start using API calls that were introduced in Windows 10 but never got backported to earlier versions?

      Just off the top of my head, the WebSocket Protocol Component API [microsoft.com] was introduced in Windows 8 / Server 2012, and if you try using it on Windows 7 you'll get a "procedure entry point could not be located" error and your program won't start (unless you were smart enough to delay-load it, in which case it would just crash as soon as you tried to use it).

      • I know several vendors who just compile everything under Windows XP or NT 4.0. Then if someone uses an API call that fails because it's too new, that will get sorted out during the compile. You might miss some optimization or a flashy new API call you can live without, but your program will run fine on a lot more Windows platforms.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      I was gonna get first post, asking the exact same thing, but thought "maybe Google knows something I don't know." The only thing I can think of is that they don't want to be running on an O/S that's no longer getting security updates from MS. That actually could make sense a bit.

    • Planned obsolescence.

      • Planned obsolescence.

        Everything is "planned obsolescence", nobody is suggesting it's going to be supported forever. Chromium is open source though so if you really want to run Chrome on Windows 7 then just compile it for that platform.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      It's probably a QA thing. At this point windows 10 is under 15% market share; it was 30% 3 years ago. So I think it's safe to say it will be close to 0 in 2 years. Doing QA on it is probably a waste of time.

      There are certainly plenty of things that can cause incompatibility in installers. For instance there are new things in BITS that the updater could be using.

      There are also various updates to direct2D and directX that chrome may be using for rendering and/or webgl.

      • At this point windows 10 is under 15% market share; it was 30% 3 years ago.

        Guessing you meant Windows 7 there. Windows 10 is something like 80% at this point.

    • What exactly changed in the application model in Win10/Win11 that would make Chrome unable to run under Win7? Seems like Chrome is just going to do an OS check and fail on Win7 for arbitrary reasons.

      Nothing changed in the application model.

      But running a program whose main aim is to connect to the internet atop an OS which will stop receiving Security Patches* is not the best idea. Actually, is a recipe for disaster

      My best guess is that, in order not to tarnish their brand, and get swamped with useless bug reports, and to save in engineering costs, google will stop developing fixes for win7 and 8,1m as well as stop testing if changes in Chrome going forward break anithing in 7 and 8.1

      * Win8.1 will stop

    • Re:Doesn't make any sense (Score:5, Interesting)

      by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @10:15PM (#62998309)

      If you drop Windows 7 support you drop all requirements to support all of the Win 3.1 -> Win 7 legacy win32\Winforms APIs and move more things to UWP and make the Windows branch of Chrome far more cross platform.

      • I don't know all that much about this subject, but I was under the impression that UWP is an entirely different toolchain than desktop Win32 and that it's a binary choice: either you're using the UWP toolchain and have a UWP "app" or you're building a desktop Win32 program. If that understanding is true, then it would seem like Chrome wouldn't just be able to flip a switch and become a UWP app if they drop support for a few legacy components (also: which components?).

        • It definitely wouldn't be a flip of a compiler flag. But it would be something that could be integrated over time. Microsoft initially banned all Win32 API usage in UWP. But the cost was UWP lacked the ENORMOUS back catalog of libraries available that had been developed for Win32 over multiple decades. For instance, I was developing a touchscreen application for a Kiosk for Windows 8 era in UWP and there wasn't even a basic web server in UWP. So I had to write a basic HTTPParser() to parse HTTP comman

      • ...make the Windows branch of Chrome far more cross platform.

        Except with Windows, apparently.

    • It's just a matter of being a jackass and prevent people from running Chrome on Win7. While I understand they don't want to keep a Win7 machine to test it, they could just say that is an unsupported/untested OS and that's all, let it run.

  • Why would you change your OS to support a browser? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:32PM (#62997991)

    There's lots of browsers, and Chrome is the most intrusive. If you're happy with Windows 7, why would you upgrade just to use Chrome?

    • There's lots of browsers, and Chrome is the most intrusive. If you're happy with Windows 7, why would you upgrade just to use Chrome?

      Errr. You would upgrade from Win7 to Win10 to keep getting security patches?

      Windows security patches for us peasants (me included) dried out on 2020, but for some corporates and Govt' agencies around the world, they keep flowing until Jan 2023 (not so coincidentaly, the same date win8.1 support dries out). Some crafty people have found ways to make the patches for the rich and powerfull flow back to us peasants, which means, we peasants running under the radar keep getting some sort of security patches unti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by G00F ( 241765 )

        because windows 10 and worse, 11 is a pile of crap. besides the huge amount of things broken/removed having to log onto the internet/Microsoft servers to even use your PC is terrible.

        If MS pulled the logged into their servers tto use youtr pc, or the way they forced/broke win 7 in the 90's they would have been sued and lost hard.

        And sadly, as much as I love linux, it can't replace windows.

  • The best Windows version ever released.
  • There's still a chip shortage and an economic crisis, which will make it difficult to upgrade to newer computers, also Covid is still around and the Ukraine War, where people have bigger priorities than upgrading the operating system. The fact that Windows 7 and 8.1 still have around 15% market share (Around 1 in 7 pcs) means that a lot of people are going to be caught in a catch-22 situation regarding their web browser. Many people can't just "switch to Firefox" either as they have web apps that rely on Ch
  • Google won't even support its own products for more than three years, after all.
  • Surely nothing is stopping someone from doing a Win7 compatibile fork of Chromium if it's too much trouble for Google themselves.
  • I have used Vivaldi successfully where others fear to execute. I think this is made by the original Opera people. I don't know whether it will be affected by this as well.

    I still believe security patch importance is often overblown. It seems that most problems today arise from phishing and maybe bad web ads/JavaScript. I push ad blockers on everyone and think HTML doesn't belong in email clients for the average user.

  • Ah, ok. Then I will no longer support Chrome.

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