Microsoft may be cutting-off support for Windows XP in just 6 months from now, but Google desires to breath just a petite more lifespan into the old Operating System. Google declared today that it will continue its support for Chrome on Windows XP till April 2015 atleast, a complete year after Microsoft halts delivering security patches on Windows XP. As Google states, the web browser is a chief point-of-attack for malware, and by using an updated browser, XP users might be competent to keep their systems secure for just a little while longer.
Excitingly, Google is hyping this as an “extension” of support for Chrome on Windows XP, indicating it was scheduling to halt support for its web browser on the same day that Microsoft stopped support for its OS. The company defends this movement of good will as a safekeeping move, as it notes unpatched browser errors are frequently used by offenders to push malware and infect systems.
Google is not unaware to the fact that Windows XP is still broadly used:
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.
Chrome official blog post described that malware frequently exploits unpatched safety bugs in browsers to infect computers. By keeping Chrome browser up-to-date till 2015, Google can at least thwart browser-based occurrences from causing disorder while companies move to fresher versions of Windows.
Google also noted that IT professionals can make use of Legacy Browser Support in Chrome for precise Web applications that only work in a diverse web browser such as Microsoft IE. That way, users would not have to depend on an unpatched browser when reading new sites.
Microsoft has by now stopped supporting Windows XP support in IE 9 and later, but endures to provide safekeeping updates for IE 8.
Given that Google and other Web services have been halting support for Internet Explorer 8 and older versions, users might need a browser that is still receiving feature updates instead of just safety patches. Windows XP still loves an approximately 20 percent market share as per the survey of StatCounter, so Google may identify an opportunity to latch those customers into its browser-based ecosystem.
