Google is extending Chrome support for Windows 7 by another year

Google continues to support all editions of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system by another year.

Microsoft ended support for Home editions of Windows 7 on January 14, 2020 officially. Businesses and Enterprise customers can subscribe to Extended Security Updates (ESU), which unlocks security updates to Windows 7 devices for up to three years. Microsoft announced this month that it won't extend support beyond January 2023.

Many software companies announced extensions of support beyond 2020. Browser makers such as Mozilla or Google announced that their products would continue to support Windows 7.

Microsoft's own Microsoft Edge web browser is supported until January 15, 2023 on Windows 7. The company stopped supporting the operating system, at least on Home systems, but continues to support select applications.

Internet Explorer 11 on the other hand, won't be supported after June 15, 2022 by Microsoft. The decision affects all supported platforms, not just the Windows 7 operating system.

Google announced that it would support Windows 7 for another year-and-a-half initially, until July 15, 2021. The company extended the pledge to support Windows 7 until January 15, 2022 at the very least. With the day coming up fast, the company announced that it would extend support by another year. In other words: Google will support Chrome on Windows 7 until at least January 15, 2023.

The new support end date syncs it with Microsoft's ESU support end date.

Important: Chrome is extending support for Windows 7 through January 15, 2023 for critical security and stability updates.

Google's wording on the support page suggest that Chrome will only receive security and stability updates, similar to how Microsoft handles updates for Windows 7 devices that are subscribed to ESU. Whether that is indeed the case or just a careful wording remains to be seen.

For now, Chrome is supported on the following Windows platforms:

• Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 or later
• Servers require Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, or Windows Server 2016.
• Intel Pentium 4 processor or later that's SSE3 capable

Other Chromium-based browsers will likely extend support by another year as well. Mozilla continues to support Firefox on Windows 7 as well; the organization has not revealed an end of support date yet for Firefox on Windows 7.

Closing Words

Google extending support by another year for Chrome on Windows 7 suggests that a sizeable number of Chrome installations is still run on Windows 7. Google did not reveal numbers, percentage or otherwise, though.

Google is extending Chrome support for Windows 7 by another year