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Chrome 50 Updates Push Notifications, Drops Support For Old Windows and OS X Versions (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 50 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, adding the usual slew of developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. As announced in November 2015, Chrome now no longer supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, nor OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Chrome 50 allows sites to include notification data payloads with their push messages. This eliminates the final server check -- the initial version relied on service workers to proactively fetch the information for a notification from the server, leading to problems when there were multiple messages in flight or when the device was on a poor network connection. Push notification payloads must be encrypted. Sites can now detect when a notification is closed by the user, resulting in better analytics and allowing for cross-device notification dismissal. The look of notifications can now be customized with timestamps and icons. Chrome 50 also brings support for declarative preload.
No one should still be running XP unless it's on a specialized system, and those shouldn't be used for general web browsing anyway.
But OS X 10.8? That came out in 2012, not 2001. Even 10.7 is still fairly modern. 10.6/Snow Leopard is getting long in the tooth, so that might make sense to drop support, but this will just make people using the older Macs run out of date browsers or find another product.
The 2 remaining users will be highly upset.
Unfortunately, there IS a reason some people may not want to upgrade OS X: some older Macbook Pros have a hardware flaw in their GPUs, and later versions of OS X panic (i.e., crash) with these machines where the older versions don't. Then there are the poor souls who just can't bring themselves to retire their PPC-based models. I mean, c'mon - the Luxor Lamp iMacs still look pretty damn cool. Generally, OS X upgrades are very worthwhile, but some people with hardware that's 5+ years old but otherwise working fine are getting the pinch.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I expect Google decision is based off of number of users more than the age of the OS's
XP is way too old.
Vista has such a small number of users who care about upgrading so why bother with them.
The same with the older OS Xs Apple provides an inexpensive upgrade path so there shouldn't be that much hassle if you have a newer system.
Supporting older systems is always a pain.
1. There is a small but obnoxiously vocal group of users. Who are very angry that they can't do newer stuff on a computer that is a decade old. However to accommodate these people you will need to sacrifice newer features available in the newer systems that will make the majority of people much happier.
2. Testing on older OS's gets tiresome.
3. More problems to fix. The further you go back the more problems you will need to fix. And how much time do you need to waste to get Vista Compatibility for such a small portion of users.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Vista has such a small number of users who care about upgrading so why bother with them.
Yet Microsoft is continuing to support these users for one more year, with support ending in mid-April 2017. This will just push users back onto Internet Explorer 9 for this final year.
Google is becoming more and more abusive, and more and more incompetent. Want to download the Google Chrome Browser? The download file name does not give the version number.
If you pay attention, that's probably because it doesn't actually have a version number associated with it. When you download chrome, you're just downloading a shim that downloads the latest copy of Chrome from Google's servers and then installs it.
The only way you can download a specific version of Chrome is if you get the MSI based installer, which is most often used for enterprise environments (because it can be deployed via group policy) but otherwise works the same.
An earlier version of the Google Chrome browser installs 3 system services.
That had to have been quite some time ago. Chrome has, for a very LONG time now, installed entirely into user space (unless you use the MSI installer) which is a deliberate design choice meant to accommodate users that don't have admin access to their PC. You can't even download such an older release with the shim that they issue now.
The browser situation is very, very ugly. Firefox is now, basically, owned by Microsoft
Ok now you're just getting stupid. Sorry, I can't fix you.