Just this week we reported on the continued post-support life of Windows XP, and now Google is distancing itself from the aging OS, too. Version 50 of Google’s Chrome browser, which released yesterday, drops support for Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. Google is also putting support for older versions of Apple’s OS X on the end-of-life chopping block. Versions 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 of OS X will stop receiving Chrome updates after version 49.
This end-of-life includes a pretty sizeable group of PCs. These OSes together account for about 13 percent of OS market share, according to Netmarketshare. Windows XP represents the lion's share of soon-to-be-unsupported Chrome users at about 11 percent. There's still some good news for people who are holding out on these outdated OSes, though—Chrome version 49 will continue to work with them for the foreseeable future. Google simply won't continue to release security and usability updates for the browser, cold comfort that may be.
Google announced the pending end-of-support for XP in April of last year, about a year after Microsoft ended support for the OS. Google provided a bit less notice for Mac OS X users. The end-of-support notice for those folks hit the Google Chrome blog in November.