Google Chrome will soon stop working on these old computers

Google Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world, partly due to the ubiquity of the company’s Android operating system and its popularity among web developers on the desktop. The browser’s open-source Chromium engine is also used by other browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and many others.

However, developers working on Google’s popular browser have now announced that the browser engine will, in fact, stop working on older processors. You’d need to be running a very old processor for this to affect you, though. If your computer’s CPU is more than 15 years old, it will likely lose support for Chrome starting with version 89, a report by TechSpot states.

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What this essentially means is, if you’re running a Celeron M series CPU or an Intel Atom processor that simply cannot meet a new minimum of SSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3) ‘instruction set’ requirement. Your CPU cannot support the new requirement, so the browser won’t install on your computer, the report states.

If you attempt to force an installation of the browser on your computer, loading it will simply result in a crash and not load again, the report states, adding that this only applies to Windows computers as other platforms that Chrome runs on already require SSE3 support on the processor, including macOS, Android and ChromeOS. You should see a message starting with Chromium 87, so you’ll have at least a few weeks before Chrome no longer works on your browser.

Read more: Google patches a major zero-day vulnerability in Chrome

When Chrome 89 comes along, you’ll have two options, retire that old computer or turn it into a basic local home server, or just sell it for parts. If you still want to use the computer to browse the internet, you can still download Mozilla’s Firefox browser that doesn’t enforce the SSE3 instruction set requirement.