Google has officially stated that they will continue to support the Chrome browser in Windows 7 to give businesses more time to migrate to Windows 10.

On January 14th, 2020, Windows 7 will reach End of Life, which means that unless you purchased Extended Security Updates licenses, Microsoft will no longer provide vulnerability or bug fixes for the operating system.

For businesses, migrating to a new operating system can be a long and arduous task and while some may argue that organizations have had enough time to do so, many factors could come into play that delays this migration.

This means that many businesses will continue to utilize Windows 7 even after it has reached End of Life and no longer receives critical security updates.

For organizations that rely on Google Chrome for their web applications or SaaS apps, Google has stated that they will continue to fully support Chrome on Windows 7 through at least July 15th, 2021.

"We have enterprises covered, even if they haven’t yet made the full move to Windows 10. We will continue to fully support Chrome on Windows 7 for a minimum of 18 months from Microsoft’s End of Life date, until at least July 15, 2021. So if you haven’t started your move to Windows 10 yet, or even if your organization is mid-way through migration, you can still benefit from the enterprise capabilities of Chrome."

With Google supporting Chrome on Windows 7 after EoL, users will continue to receive security updates for the browser and enterprise policies and management tools will continue to work.

If users utilize a Google Account with Chrome, then all of their settings, bookmarks, and installed extensions will also be available on machines where they are also logged into Chrome.

This allows for a seamless migration when users ultimately upgrade their machines to a newer version of Windows.

While it is great that Google will continue to support Windows 7 for the foreseeable future, businesses should make it a priority to upgrade to a modern operating system.

Using Windows 7 after EoL is simply too much of a security risk that potentially leaves companies open to threats that could cost them far more than the migration to Windows 10.