Extending Chrome support for XP users until April 2015

Posted by Mark Larson, Director of Engineering and Superintendent of Public Safety, Google Chrome

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog)

On April 8, 2014, after more than a decade of powering many of the world’s computers, Windows XP will officially retire. Like all technologies that come to their end-of-life, the XP operating system and most of its desktop applications will no longer receive updates and security patches. Since unpatched browser bugs are often used by malware to infect computers, we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015.

We recognize that hundreds of millions of users, including a good chunk of current Chrome users, still rely on XP. Moreover, many organizations still run dozens or even hundreds of applications on XP and may have trouble migrating. Our goal is to support Chrome for XP users during this transition process. Most importantly, Chrome on XP will still be automatically updated with the latest security fixes to protect against malware and phishing attacks.

If you’re an IT administrator and your employees depend on web applications built for older browsers, you can use Legacy Browser Support to set Chrome as the primary browser and limit the usage of the unsupported, legacy browser to only specific web apps. See Chrome for Business to learn more about how to deploy and manage Chrome for an organization.