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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how this works? My guess was that Google dropped support for older versions of Windows because Chromium needed libraries that only worked on newer versions, guess that isn't the case?

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It is the case, but this project seems to be backporting Chrome to the older APIs or restoring original Chrome code which has since been removed. For example modern Chrome always uses DirectWrite for font rendering, which debuted in Windows 7, but Supermium can fall back to the legacy GDI font renderer that's available on XP.

"Needed", means it's easier for them and why should they care about a dead and insecure os.

> why should they care about a dead and insecure os.

Developing for old technologies in general (especially hardware) can help make your code and project lighter in general.

(see: alternative frontends for YouTube and Twitter, YouTube circa. 2005-2011, even 2012-2016)

It can do that, but it can also mean that you can't use better performing ways to do things that were only introduced in a newer OS.

You can if you have fallbacks for when those features aren't available.

But why have fallbacks for unsupported OSes, which are hard to even test (as the OSes themselves probably shouldn’t be attached to the internet due to possible security issues).

True, but that tends to require a bunch of extra code, and adds complexity since now you have two different paths to test. Which is manageable, but definitely cuts against the goal of keeping the project “light”. (Of course, it depends on the feature and the language/environment you’re using. Sometimes the fallback is trivial, or can be neatly encapsulated in a third-party polyfill you never have to look at.)

Now that is the part where it doesn't make the project lighter.

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