Google Chrome is dropping support for some really old CPUs

In a policy document, the Chromium development team has announced that they are dropping support for all x86 CPUs which do not have a minimum of SSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3) support, starting in Chrome 89.

This generally means pre-Intel Core 2 Duo processors (e.g. Intel Atom and Celeron M processors) with most post-2005 processors supporting SSE3 already. Windows 10 itself only requires SSE2 support.

Chrome will start posting a warning with Chrome 87 that support for such hardware will end soon.

Starting with Chrome 89 the Installer will no longer attempt to install Chrome, and actually running the software will simply crash.

Only Windows is expected to be impacted by the change (by a very small amount) as ChromeOS, Android and Mac already require CPUs (e.g. x64) which already has with SSE3 level support. The exact justification for the change was not explained, but we assume the change will allow greater performance.

We assume, given that Microsoft also uses Chromium, that Edge will also be affected by this change in support.

Read all the detail of the coming change here.

via Eric Law