Gmail on Chrome will soon stop working on older versions of Windows and Chrome

If you’re using older versions of Google’s Chrome browser, soon you won’t be able to access the firm’s Gmail web app. Due to new security measured being implemented in Gmail, the site will only fully load on Chrome versions above Chrome 53, anything versions below will be redirected to a basic HTML version as early as December 2017.

In a post on the official Google Blog,  Google warned:

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 of Chrome, currently on version 55. Chrome Browser v55 contains several important security updates.

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. As previously announced in April 2015 and November 2015, these systems are no longer maintained by Microsoft, and we strongly encourage you to migrate to more secure and supported systems.

Windows XP currently forms a relatively large proportion of Windows users with roughly 9% of users still on it at last count. Perhaps as more apps and services drop support for this positively ancient Windows version, stragglers will be forced to move on to newer and more secure versions of Windows (As for the Windows Vista users, they have our sympathy).