Google’s Chromium development team has announced that Chrome will no longer be supported on some older PCs powered by pre-SSE3 Intel Atom or Celeron M processors.
Google says the number of users affected by the change is likely to be small because it will only affect Windows and Linux users running Chrome on very old systems. Impacted devices will be about 15 years old at this point, TechRadar noted.
“Our analysis... indicates that there is a very small number of Windows devices running Chrome with x86 processors that do not support SSE3,” Google said in a note.
Devices that don’t meet the new minimum CPU requirements will no longer attempt to install Chrome, and running Chrome itself will result in a crash. Google said users with affected PCs will soon start receiving warnings saying support for the browser will be ending soon.
“Until we require SSE3, Chrome will warn impacted users (with x86 CPUs that don’t support SSE3) that their computers will soon be unsupported,” the company said. “The implementation will use the framework in //chrome/browser/obsolete_system. This will result in a dismissable warning bar, and a permanent warning in the chrome://settings/help page.”
Google didn’t give specific reasons for dropping support for the browser, but the likely reason is that so few devices are still running SSE2. Upgrading from one of these older processors should result in better performance.
Users who will be impacted by the upcoming change can either switch to a new browser or upgrade their device in order to keep using Chrome.