Google announced early in 2015 that its Chrome browser will still support Windows XP operating system until the end of the year. Now that 2015 is drawing to a close, Google announced recently that starting April 2016, the browser will no longer roll out updates and security fixes for Chrome running on Windows XP.
The end of support for XP did not come as a surprise to the tech community as Google gave users ample time to make the transition to newer operating systems. Aside from Windows XP, Google will also stop releasing Chrome updates to Windows Vista, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.7 and Mac OS X 10.8.
Google said that the decision to cease releasing updates to the mentioned operating systems is because "these platforms are no longer actively supported by Microsoft and Apple."
Chrome director of Engineering Mark Pawliger posted on Chrome's official blog, "Such older platforms are missing critical security updates and have a greater potential to be infected by viruses and malware."
Latest statistics reveal that Windows XP only holds less than 10 percent of global market share while Windows Vista is under two percent.
In the case of Mac, OS X users are known to update their machines very quickly which means that the latest move from Google will not affect a lot of users on the Mac platform. Most computers still running on the OS X 10.6.8 platform are the old Mac that has PowerPC processors, according to PC World. Users of these machines are stuck with the OS X 10.6.8 since that is the last version of the operating system to support PowerPC processors, which majority are Power Macs and Power Books.