Google has announced that its email service, Gmail, will end support for Google Chrome 53 and below by the end of the year. The move comes as a security prevention measure.
Gmail says that it expects Windows XP and Windows Vista users will be the most affected ones by this. And that’s because Google ended update support for the two operating systems, last year, with the release of Chrome 49.
Google says that because Microsoft has stopped updates for the two OS’, it won’t update its browser because of security risks. Well, if only this applied to Android devices, almost every Nexus device from 2014 or older would be deemed insecure because Google stopped updating the OS. It would be interesting to see what happens to Windows 7, when it reaches the end of security updates in 2020.
Now, back to the news at hand, Gmail will begin redirecting Chrome 53 users (or older) to the basic HTML version of its service by the end of the year. But, Google’s announcement post is actually quite poorly worded, with an especially misleading title, which says “Gmail no longer supporting Chrome Browser version 53 and below “, and that a banner would be displayed on the Gmail page asking users to upgrade to Chrome 55. That makes it sound as if Gmail has already stopped working on Chrome 53 and older. This is incorrect.
The latter half of the article, contradicts the title, by saying that Gmail will continue to work on Chrome v53 and below, till the end of the year, and that the redirect to the HTML version will take place in December 2017. Basically, that does confirm that only Gmail’s latest features will not work on older versions of Chrome.
It is unclear if Google will impose such a rule for other browsers like Firefox, IE, etc.