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Google Will Retire Chrome Support For XP, Vista, OS X 10.6-8 In April 2016 (blogspot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced it is extending Chrome support for Windows XP until April 2016. The company will also end Chrome support for Windows Vista, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion at the same time. This means Google will provide regular Chrome updates and security patches for users on these operating systems for five more months. After that, the browser will still work, but it will be stuck on the last version released in April.
The real reason however is that certain bleeding edge HTML5 technology (webmidi, webgl2) doesn't have the necessary privilege separation on older operating systems, and the older operating systems will never have bugs fixed to resolve that.
I'm sure Chromium will keep working for a while. It's not necessary for Chromium/Node-Webkit (for all intents are the same thing) to be updated unless it's actually using the internet. Most software using Chromium as it's "cross platform" engine aren't actually using it for very much except the canvas/webgl/webaudio via Javascript. Everything else the "Browser" offers is practically useless. Unfortunately stock versions of Chromium and node-webkit package a lot of stuff that needs to be ejected if it's to be used by games:
1) Drop PDF, JPEG, GIF, WEBP, leaving only PNG.
2) Drop WebM/MP4 containers, and all video codecs except for hardware supported h.265/h.264 + AAC/FLAC. Allow playback of RGB/YUV444 h.265/h.264 "lossless" video so that there is no more of this "animation gradient banding" on video that should be highly compressible but isn't because the compression process can't figure out that a gradient can't lose half it's color data and still work.
3) Drop Extensions, Pepper, Flash and Java API's
4) Drop the development console.
Ideally developers would compile Chromium with what they need for their project and not rely on the 250MB insane "package" sizes that Chrome/Chromium/Node-webkit come with. Unfortunately this is often difficult. Sure 70MB doesn't look like much for the most stripped down runtime, but when your ANDROID app requires a 70MB runtime to run 300KB of code, there is something hugely fricken wrong.
So you can simply switch to chromium now and not worry about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you want a chrome rendering engine for an android app, why not use WebView? It's included in Android so you don't need to distribute it.
What does market share have to do with whether or not one uses an OS?
I don't respond to AC's.
It means that you can't expect support for forever if you're using one of the minority Windows versions. Just upgrade already.