7 ms·

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. There are a lot of people still on Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8. This is dropping su

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. There are a lot of people still on Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8. This is dropping support for about 14% of all desktops. That's a lot of people. It's especially irresponsible that "Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes". They should be strongly encouraging those users to switch to a browser that's still supported on those platforms (which is probably only Firefox at this point). Given Google's stance on autoupdating to be consistent they really should be pushing out a final update that prevents Chrome from running on those machines. A policy of "autoupdate till we don't care about you anymore" undermines the entire idea of automatically updating browsers.

legulere 11y ago
They should strongly encourage them to upgrade their operating systems, as the underlying operating systems also don't get updates anymore.
- true_religion 11y ago
  Some people's systems are unable to handle the memory or CPU requirements of newer operating systems. Due to that, they are unlikely to upgrade. That said, I think the question of how to serve these people is best left up to website operators and the people themselves.
  - nisa 11y ago
    If your machine can deal with Vista it can deal with Windows 8 or Windows 10. You have to disable some knobs like Cortana but usually it's not slower. I'm having a Pentium M notebook with 2GB memory and it's working fine. Getting 2GB memory for old machines is pretty cheap - a few dollars on eBay. A desktop with at least some 64bit Core2Duo is actually pretty fast if not even faster with Windows 10 instead of Windows 7 / Vista - 4GB is fine for office on such a machine. The only caveat are these privacy and spy addons. I've yet to read some conclusive summary of these.
    - true_religion 11y ago
      I suppose it's anecdotal, but I had a desktop machine with 4GB of ram that was bought for Windows XP. It dealt well with Windows 7, but the moment I upgraded to Windows 8 I noticed it was very slow. Unwilling to spend time tweaking it, I downgraded immediately. Now I'm a developer. My mother on the other hand kept a Windows XP laptop running on a Celeron M processor and 1GB of memory. It felt snappy enough; but I wouldn't trust it to run Windows 10 applications because while Windows itself might dial down enough, something like Chrome will happily gobble 500GB of memory because it thinks it can.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      Windows 8 and later requires a NX capable processor though, and not all Pentium Ms supports it. More importantly, Win8 no longer supports XPDM, and if you are forced into using MSBDD because of this (likely if you using the IGP on such a machine) suspend won't work.
  - legulere 11y ago
    I don't think CPU or memory really is a problem. Windows 10 requires 1GB of RAM. The bigger problem probably is that upgrading actually is costing time, programs/drivers might stop working, home users might think they're not able to update the computer theirselves or they don't even see the reason they need to.
- anon1385 11y ago
  Vista is getting Extended support until 11 April 2017. Lack of vendor support can't be the reason for dropping these platforms - Chrome has continued to support XP and OS X 10.6 despite those being unsupported for years, and it's now dropping support for Vista while it's still supported by Microsoft.
mhurron 11y ago
> There are a lot of people still on Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8. Excepting for Vista, those are out of support from their vendor, so why should 3rd parities be obligated to support them?
- anon1385 11y ago
  In exchange for taking control of Chrome updates out of the hands of users Google is accepting the moral responsibility for fixing security issues for those users. They are now abandoning those users. I would hope that as a minimum they would show a very obvious alert to people on abandoned platforms warning them that the autoupdate agreement between user and browser vendor has been broken and that they need to find a new browser. But I think they should go further. Google's logic for taking control over updates away from users is that it's too dangerous to let people continue to use old insecure versions of web browsers. If old browser versions are too dangerous to use then they should prevent Chrome from running on unsupported platforms since the only versions that will run on those platforms are by definition old insecure versions.
  - sbierwagen 11y ago
    Jesus christ, what "moral responsibility"? None of these people are paying for a service contact from Google. Nobody anywhere is obliged to actively maintain a piece of software forever.
    - anon1385 11y ago
      I didn't ask them to maintain it forever. I said they should prevent the insecure versions from running, which is what their current policy is anyway.
  - kybernetyk 11y ago
    >is accepting the moral responsibility for fixing security issues for those users. They are now abandoning those users. Google is a business. They decided to stop supporting a platform they don't think is relevant to their business anymore. There is no "moral" responsibility there besides looking at what's good for Google. If users (customers) decided back then that they'd rather have free browsers and didn't support commercial (paid) alternatives they are now the only ones to blame for this happening. At this point the user can't even vote with their wallet now. They willingly gave away all their power for free stuff. Clinging onto some "moral responsibility" is delusional. Now I get the allure of free stuff. But I also think many people blissfully ignore the fact that everything they do will have some form of consequences down the road and that there is no "free" stuff in life.

legulere 11y ago

They should strongly encourage them to upgrade their operating systems, as the underlying operating systems also don't get updates anymore.

true_religion 11y ago
Some people's systems are unable to handle the memory or CPU requirements of newer operating systems. Due to that, they are unlikely to upgrade. That said, I think the question of how to serve these people is best left up to website operators and the people themselves.
- nisa 11y ago
  If your machine can deal with Vista it can deal with Windows 8 or Windows 10. You have to disable some knobs like Cortana but usually it's not slower. I'm having a Pentium M notebook with 2GB memory and it's working fine. Getting 2GB memory for old machines is pretty cheap - a few dollars on eBay. A desktop with at least some 64bit Core2Duo is actually pretty fast if not even faster with Windows 10 instead of Windows 7 / Vista - 4GB is fine for office on such a machine. The only caveat are these privacy and spy addons. I've yet to read some conclusive summary of these.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    I suppose it's anecdotal, but I had a desktop machine with 4GB of ram that was bought for Windows XP. It dealt well with Windows 7, but the moment I upgraded to Windows 8 I noticed it was very slow. Unwilling to spend time tweaking it, I downgraded immediately. Now I'm a developer. My mother on the other hand kept a Windows XP laptop running on a Celeron M processor and 1GB of memory. It felt snappy enough; but I wouldn't trust it to run Windows 10 applications because while Windows itself might dial down enough, something like Chrome will happily gobble 500GB of memory because it thinks it can.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    Windows 8 and later requires a NX capable processor though, and not all Pentium Ms supports it. More importantly, Win8 no longer supports XPDM, and if you are forced into using MSBDD because of this (likely if you using the IGP on such a machine) suspend won't work.
- legulere 11y ago
  I don't think CPU or memory really is a problem. Windows 10 requires 1GB of RAM. The bigger problem probably is that upgrading actually is costing time, programs/drivers might stop working, home users might think they're not able to update the computer theirselves or they don't even see the reason they need to.
anon1385 11y ago
Vista is getting Extended support until 11 April 2017. Lack of vendor support can't be the reason for dropping these platforms - Chrome has continued to support XP and OS X 10.6 despite those being unsupported for years, and it's now dropping support for Vista while it's still supported by Microsoft.

mhurron 11y ago

> There are a lot of people still on Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8. Excepting for Vista, those are out of support from their vendor, so why should 3rd parities be obligated to support them?

anon1385 11y ago
In exchange for taking control of Chrome updates out of the hands of users Google is accepting the moral responsibility for fixing security issues for those users. They are now abandoning those users. I would hope that as a minimum they would show a very obvious alert to people on abandoned platforms warning them that the autoupdate agreement between user and browser vendor has been broken and that they need to find a new browser. But I think they should go further. Google's logic for taking control over updates away from users is that it's too dangerous to let people continue to use old insecure versions of web browsers. If old browser versions are too dangerous to use then they should prevent Chrome from running on unsupported platforms since the only versions that will run on those platforms are by definition old insecure versions.
- sbierwagen 11y ago
  Jesus christ, what "moral responsibility"? None of these people are paying for a service contact from Google. Nobody anywhere is obliged to actively maintain a piece of software forever.
  - anon1385 11y ago
    I didn't ask them to maintain it forever. I said they should prevent the insecure versions from running, which is what their current policy is anyway.
- kybernetyk 11y ago
  >is accepting the moral responsibility for fixing security issues for those users. They are now abandoning those users. Google is a business. They decided to stop supporting a platform they don't think is relevant to their business anymore. There is no "moral" responsibility there besides looking at what's good for Google. If users (customers) decided back then that they'd rather have free browsers and didn't support commercial (paid) alternatives they are now the only ones to blame for this happening. At this point the user can't even vote with their wallet now. They willingly gave away all their power for free stuff. Clinging onto some "moral responsibility" is delusional. Now I get the allure of free stuff. But I also think many people blissfully ignore the fact that everything they do will have some form of consequences down the road and that there is no "free" stuff in life.