Chrome 50 improves push notifications, drops support for Windows XP
Windows XP user? Sorry, no Chrome 50 for you...
Google Chrome 50 has launched for Windows, Mac, and Linux, bringing users a number of new features -- but not if they're still using Windows XP or other older operating systems, which the browser no longer supports.
"The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 50 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux," the company said.
Plans to remove support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion were revealed in November 2015. Google justified the decision by citing how "these platforms are no longer actively supported by Microsoft and Apple". Chrome will continue to run on these platforms, but it will no longer receive updates and security fixes.
However, for those running operating systems which are still compatible with Chrome, Google says it has delivered "big efforts" in the development of 50.
One of those updates is an improvement to push notifications, enabling websites which send them to detect when the notification was closed by the user, then use analytics to improve dismissal of notifications by users on the site across different devices. Essentially, it should mean that if a user dismisses a notification via their desktop, the notification will also be closed on their smartphone or tablet.
Chrome 50 also provides the ability for websites to tell the browser what should be downloaded ahead of time, allowing the website to load for the user faster than it could be before and enable users to gain quicker access to the content they desire. Chrome 50 will also provide Android users with the ability to pause or cancel downloads within Chrome.
50 also contains 20 security fixes, some of which were provided by external researchers, who Google have specially thanked.
"We would also like to thank all security researchers that worked with us during the development cycle to prevent security bugs from ever reaching the stable channel," the company said in the blog post on the update.
Google has also released a 'Save to Google' Chrome extension, which does exactly what it says on the tin by allowing users to save web pages for viewing later with just one click, then providing a specially designed UI to view select saved pages from later.