Supermium is a browser based on the Google Chrome 121 codebase that works fine on Windows 7 and even, for the truly desperate, for Vista and XP.

Thethird-party adaptation of Chrome works on versions of Windows that the official product no longer supports. It installs and runs on Windows 7, whichstopped getting updates for Edge and Chrome at the start of 2023. It's even able to log into a Google account, as well as synchronize settings and addons.

Chrome version 121 isn'tcompletely current – at the time of writing,that is version 124.0.6329.0 – but it's substantially more recent than the previous best official offering of version 109. DeveloperShane "win32ss" Fournier previously developed theVista Extended Kernel, which allowed the exceptionally determined to run some Windows 7 apps on its much maligned predecessor. He offers both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Supermium, and thesource code is on GitHub.

Please don't try this at home. But, if you need evidence, here's Chrome 121 on Windows XP, more or less (click to enlarge)

More impressively, it works fine on Windows XP, giving this ancient OS its most current browser by quite some way (you do need a CPU capable of SSE2, though). When we looked atrunning XP in 2023, the Mozilla-basedMyPal68 was the most complete modern browser we could find. We tested Supermium on our Core 2 Duo XP64 laptop, and not only did it work well, it was also surprisingly fast. Sites such as Gmail and Facebook were perfectly usable.

This, on the other hand, is a more defensible proposition: Supermium 121 on Windows 7, running very nicely thank you (click to enlarge)

Once again, we urge younot to run Windows XP on any internet-connected computer in the third decade of the 21st century. Some users, though, have no choice, such as those running expensive peripherals – like an$18,000 X-ray machine – that don't work with anything newer. If you have no alternative but to keep XP alive, Supermium does work. You can't install it in the normal way – the installer crashes with an error. However, you can manually unzip the package –7-Zip works fine on XP and XP64 – then copy the files intoC:\Program Files\ and run the binary directly.

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Windows 10 willreach its end of life in 17 months and a lot of perfectly serviceable Windows 10 PCs can't run Windows 11,even if there are workarounds. If you can't handle Linux for some reason and therefore must run an unsupported version of Windows, we have to agree with those who feel that Windows 7 is a lot more pleasant and attractive than any later version.

There are other ways to run newer Chrome-based browsers on Windows 7, such asReinhard Blaukovitch's crack. However, Supermium is rather less intimidating, and because of Fournier's changes to the Chromium code to use older Windows APIs, it also runs on Windows XP, Vista, and 8.x. ®

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