Gmail no longer supporting Chrome Browser version 53 and below | Hacker News Reader

Gmail no longer supporting Chrome Browser version 53 and below

gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com

18 pointsleothekim10 comments

Important context from the article:

  Starting February 8, 2017, we will show a banner
  at the top of the Gmail interface for users who
  are still on Google Chrome Browser v53 and below
  to encourage upgrading to the latest version

And

  Gmail will continue to function on Chrome Browser
  v53 and below through the end of the year. Users
  who remain on Chrome v53 and below could be
  redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail
  as early as Dec 2017.

I'm kind of frustrated at this, heh. I'm on chrome 49 because I can't install anything newer on my linux mint machine. I can't install a newer one because of a dependency, which requires a newer kernel version.

So I'm stuck with an out dated version of Chrome due to my linux kernel version (which I don't feel like updating and alienating my virtualbox drivers). Chrome 49 isn't even that old, I think it is < 1 year.

Google doesn't care about you.

Using a 1 year old browser really is suicide when you look at the security bugs fixed over that year...

I get nervous when my browser is a week old because I haven't restarted it. Even a week is a long time to do wide distribution of a zero-day exploit.

Use firefox

Likely my best course of action.

what about changing user agent?

For those wondering Chrome v53 was released about 6 months ago. That's quite amazing.

It's really not that amazoling; their official, published supported browser policy is that only the current release of Chrome is supported, and they are actually supporting v53 until December.

This is, per the post, only being specially announced because it affects WinXP and Vista users, because Chrome hasn't supported those platforms after v49.

This change will likely impact Electron apps that access the Gmail web interface. It was only recently that Electron 1.5.0 beta (https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v1.5.0) brought with it Chromium 54.

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