Google to Stop Support for Chrome on Windows XP, OS X 10.8 in April 2016

Google has announced that it will stop supporting Chrome Web browser on older operating systems. The company has said that it will discontinue support for Chrome on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and OS X 10.8 or lower versions after April 2016. Even after the deadline, the browser will continue to exist, but it won't receive any security or performance boosts from the company.

With Google announcing its plan to end support for Chrome, users of the aforementioned operating systems will start to face vulnerabilities as the search giant will stop rolling out patches. To be noted however, is that Microsoft itself officially ended support for Windows XP in 2014, and stopped offering security patches to Internet Explorer 6 and other products and services.

"Such older platforms are missing critical security updates and have a greater potential to be infected by viruses and malware," the company wrote in a blog post. The company advises users to upgrade to a newer operating system.

Despite being out of the support cycle, hundreds of thousands of computers continue to run the nearly 15-year-old operating system. According to market research firm Net Applications, around 11 percent of computers are currently running Windows XP. As per the firm, around 1.74 percent use Windows Vista, while OS X 10.8 or lower versions constitute about one percent of the market. Currently, Chrome and Firefox are among the few popular Web browsers that continue to receive updates for their Windows XP versions.

It's worth pointing out that Google had originally set April 2015 as the retirement date for Chrome on Windows XP, but later extended it to December 2015. The good news is that many users are finally switching to Windows 7 or newer operating systems. The market share of Windows XP has significantly fallen over the past few months, going down from roughly 40 percent in the recent past to 11 percent.