Google to ‘fully support’ Chrome on Windows 7 for at least 18 more months

In a little over a week, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 7 with security updates. For its part, Google will keep updating Chrome on the over decade-old OS for another 18 months.

Google Cloud’s advice to enterprise is to transition to Windows 10. For those that haven’t, it will “continue to fully support Chrome on Windows 7 for a minimum of 18 months from Microsoft’s End of Life date, until at least July 15, 2021.”

So if you haven’t started your move to Windows 10 yet, or even if your organization is midway through migration, you can still benefit from the enterprise capabilities of Chrome.

During this period, Chrome will benefit from built-in security capabilities like Safe Browsing, Site Isolation, and last month’s password and phishing protections. Chrome Windows 7 support presumably also extends to new user-facing features.

Security updates and technical assistance from Microsoft will stop on January 14, 2020, with the OS vendor warning how “your PC will still work, but it may become more vulnerable to security risks.” Chrome’s extended move comes as Internet Explore on Windows 7 will also be discontinued next week.

Enterprises still running Windows can pay for extended support through 2023, while dates vary for embedded variants.

According to Statcounter, Windows 7 usage as of last month was at 26.79% versus 65.4% for Windows 10. The last set of major OS deprecations from Google was in April 2016 when Chrome stopped supporting Windows XP, Vista, and some older versions of macOS.