Google extends Chrome support for Windows 7 until 2022

Google will keep providing updates for Chrome on Windows 7 for six months longer than it originally planned. The tech giant announced in January this year that it’ll stop supporting the browser for the old Windows OS on July 15th, 2021. Now, though, the company has revealed that it’ll continue supporting Chrome for the platform until at least January 15th, 2022.

In its announcement, Google says businesses and their IT teams had to face a lot of challenges this year due to work-from-home arrangements and other work environment changes brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. “[S]ome planned IT projects may have had to take a back seat” to more important projects, the company writes, so it chose to listen to feedback from enterprise customers. While Windows 7 is over a decade old, a lot of organizations still use it — according to Google’s data, 22 percent of organizations using Windows OS has yet to migrate to Windows 10 from Windows 7.

By moving the deadline to six months later than planned, Google is hoping to give enterprise customers enough time to move off the old OS without having to worry about security. Microsoft itself has stopped providing security updates for the operating system after January 14th, 2020, though companies can continue paying for support until 2023.