Google Will Still Support Chrome On Windows XP Until The End Of The Year

If you are using Chrome on Windows XP — and for the love of God, I hope you don’t — you’ll still get updated versions of Chrome until the end of the year.

The Chrome team today announced that even though it had planned to phase out Windows XP support this month, users of Microsoft’s antiquated and insecure operating system will still get regular updates and security patched through the end of 2015.

“We know that not everyone can easily switch to a newer operating system,” Google Chrome director of engineering Mark Larson writes today. “Millions of people are still working on XP computers every day. We want those people to have the option to use a browser that’s up-to-date and as safe as possible on an unsupported operating system.”

Windows XP is the operating system that just won’t die. Millions of people still use it every day even though Microsoft stopped officially supporting it for consumers in 2009 and for enterprises last April. Its worldwide market share is currently somewhere between 12 and 19 percent, depending on who you ask.

Running an outdated operating system and a potentially insecure browser is a recipe for getting hacked and it’s good to see that both Chrome and Firefox will still offer updated versions for XP — though sadly, many of the people who are still running XP are probably also still using Internet Explorer 8.