Google will keep providing updates for Chrome on Windows 7 for six months longer than it originally planned.
Support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020 officially for all Home systems while Enterprise and business customers could extend support by up to three years. The organizations and companies had to pay Microsoft for the privilege of receiving up to three years worth of security updates for the operating system.
While Microsoft gave Home users no option to extend the life of the operating system, browser makers and other software companies decided to extend support of their products because large numbers of users were still using devices with Windows 7 when official support ended.
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.
