I am able to run Chrome 50.0.2661.102 on Vista

[adsfqwop]

I'm posting this in the XP forum, since I think more people here may be interested to try this.

As many of you may know, Chrome 49.0.2623.112 was supposed to be the last official version to support XP and Vista. Well, as it turns out, you can upgrade your 49.0.2623.112 to 50.0.2661.102, at least on Vista, very easily. People in this forum may want to try this out on XP too.

I figured this out by accident, mucking around with different Chrome versions on my Vista SP2 32-bit. I started with the very next version after 49 and worked up from there. I discovered all 50.x versions still work on Vista. At 51 the browser still runs, but the rendering engine produces only a blank page.

How to do this? The installer refuses to install anything above 49 on Vista/XP, but you can still extract the installer contents with 7zip.

So, download 50.0.2661.102 from Filepuma (link below), and then use 7zip to extract everything into a folder somewhere. You will be left with a package named Chrome.7z. Extract this too. In there you will find Chrome.exe.

Do not run it, or it will load your current Chrome profile. Instead create a shortcut and edit the target to something like this, which will make 50 use a private profile and not touch any other current profile you are using:

chrome.exe --user-data-dir=C:\SomeFolder\Where\You\Want\The\Profile

What't the advantage of 50.0.2661.102 vs 49.0.2623.112? You have to test it out yourself, but so far I have noticed for example that Youtube Creator Studio now works, whereas on Chrome 49 it's a total mess. So there seems to be some HTML engine improvements on 50 vs 49, at least. The JS engine is also a newer version compared to 49, so there are upgrades there too.

If you want to try out another versions, you can find all the old ones here:
https://www.filepuma.com/download/google_chrome_32bit_-40/versions/

Direct link to 50.0.2661.102 (32-bit):
https://www.filepuma.com/download/google_chrome_32bit_50.0.2661.102-11514/

 

[Vistapocalypse]

The fact that Chrome 50 will run on Vista has been known for years, as posted in Last versions of software for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 under Web Browsers , which even has links to FilePuma. I don’t think it will run on XP though.

[MintChocAero]

3 hours ago, Vistapocalypse said:

The fact that Chrome 50 will run on Vista has been known for years, as posted in Last versions of software for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 under Web Browsers , which even has links to FilePuma. I don’t think it will run on XP though.

It displays an error if I'm not mistaken, related to a kernel32.dll missing function iirc.

That said, YT Studio loads fine in 50? Interesting... know any other pages that load better in this build?

Edited October 3, 2020 by MintChocAero

[Vistapocalypse]

Would you please test Chrome 50 at SSL Labs client test and post again about its protocol support? If it only supports TLS 1.0, then Chrome 50 depends on system resources just like Chrome 49.