Google has announced that it will end support for old Chrome versions of Gmail, leaving the browser vulnerable to security risks. This will happen by the end of December 2017 and it will start with Chrome version 53 and earlier in the coming months.
Starting February 8th, users who will open older versions of Chrome to check their Gmail account will notice a banner at the top of the page which will warn them to upgrade their browser. These changes have already been announced by Google on its official blog, mentioning that “Gmail users that are still on Windows XP and Windows Vista are the most likely to be affected, because v49 was the last released version which supported those operating systems.”
The company has also informed users that “Chrome Browser v55 contains several important security updates”, and Gmail will continue to work properly on the aforementioned Chrome versions by the end of December 2017. After that, Gmail will become vulnerable to security risks and users could infect their devices with all kinds of viruses.
Google has also said that “When reloading a page, browsers will check with the web server if cached resources are still usable, a process known as validation. This typically results in hundreds of network requests per page issued to dozens of domains. On mobile devices, the high latency and transient nature of mobile connections mean that this behavior can produce serious performance issues.”
Google Chrome 56, which is the latest released version, has simplified the reload behavior, so that less bandwidth will be consumed and this will lead to less power, and latency. Users will see that pages will reload around 28 percent faster, which is a great improvement. Facebook has reported that after Chrome has simplified its reload behavior, there were 60 percent less validation requests. Another important change in Chrome 56 is the warning displayed for insecure HTTP webpages.
Sad.