Source: Sunsetting support for Windows 7 / 8/8.1 in early 2023
Brave, being the wholly independent browsing experience, outside of Google's umbrella , predictably followed suite with a similar announcement shortly thereafter: Sunsetting support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1
Now, given the relatively open nature of Chromium, it's quite probable a Windows 7-targetted fork will surface as this situation develops. For context, Chromium is currently being built by enthusiasts for OS X Lion. Bookmark this topic and check back periodically, as the information contained will be updated as this situation evolves.
With Windows being in a relatively static state from NT 6.x onward, the prospect of a fork sanitized of Windows 10-centric requirements is far more promising than the browser drought that struck XP a number of years ago. It is worth adding that great progress has been made toward getting modern Chromium on XP. Numerous repacks of Chinese-developed Chromium browsers with English language localization and sanitation of telemetry exist, maintained here by our own fellow forum members. These do work, but are dependent upon very closed sourced eastern companies, with reliance on enthusiasts to sanitize them for safe usage.
Fork candidates:
Thorium Browser is currently built for Linux and Windows. Its primary goal is to improve performance on some systems, building with AVX, etc. The developer seeks to maintain a Windows 7-specific build, one without the need for AVX. Builds are now available! This project shows great promise, and is nevertheless worth a look. Windows GitHub
Fairly close to vanilla Chrome, with some minor facelifts and feature set changes done. This fork supported Windows XP and Vista for some time after Google sunsetted these systems, but ultimately failed to keep these variants updated for long.
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Some closing advice:
i would advise against using official Google Chrome, on any platform, and insist instead you try a community Chromium build. This comes with a number of perks as opposed to bone-stock Chrome.
- For one, the pesky auto updating agent is not included. This greatly frees up system resources when the browser is closed, as Chrome constantly runs a background service to update the browser and submit statistics, even when it appears the browser is not running!
- Fewer nags about operating system support. It is quite likely that if a Windows 7-friendly community build of Chromium surfaces, it could take some time to come to fruition. While a Chrome version temporarily frozen on a specific build is quite usable, expect Google to go out of their way to drive you bananas. In more extreme cases, versions have been bricked, rendering it completely unusable. Such was the case with Mac OS X 10.9.
- Privacy. While some community builds of Chromium provide Google Sync keys to sync your browser, just like Chrome, less data is collected about you when signed out of Sync.
Lastly. If your workflow permits, I would recommend switching to Firefox. It's a good deal more customizable than the Chromes, with extensive theming options available thanks to userchrome projects like this one here. Community rebuilds of Firefox for legacy platforms have also proven to be less sparse than their Chromium counterparts, evident by Feodor2's MyPal68, or the Pale Moon project, maintained by RoyTam1 as New Moon for XP/Vista users.