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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good thing.

There are going to be people who, for whatever reason, are going to be on XP for loooong time. It's better for everyone that they have access to a modern, evolving browser.

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At my day job many of our users work in IT environments where the two allowed browsers are Chrome and IE, and a lot of them are still on windows XP, so this is a really good thing.

Chrome support wouldn't be so important if there was a more modern IE available on XP.

Given that XP stops getting security patches in April and will then be even more of a problem in terms of botnets , not to mention a security issue for anyone using it , I think a strong case can be made that no, it's not better to give people modern evolving anything on XP.

They should feel like they are living in the dark ages, devoid of modern luxuries and subject to the whim of any thug that comes along ... because they are or soon will be.

I guess we'll just agree to disagree. A non-zero percentage of people will be stuck on XP because they don't know better or don't own the machine. I would much rather have those people use Chrome than IE8. They are far less likely to become part of a botnet if they have a modern browser.

I still use XP, but only in a VM for those few apps I use that either don't work in WINE or don't have a Linux port (Quickbooks is a big one).

I see no reason to use Windows 7 in a VM for this since it has a larger install footprint and uses more memory.

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