As usual, the date is Microsoft’s “Patch Day”, which always takes place on the second Tuesday of the month, when the software company publishes updates for all of its supported products. January 10, 2023 could therefore bring updates for the two old operating systems Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 one last time.
Mainstream support ended three years ago
Since mainstream support ended in 2020, Windows 7 has long since entered the phase of paid extended support. Microsoft had previously extended the update supply several times because Windows 7 was extremely popular for a long time due to its less than successful successor.
The date is also the deadline for the deployment of Microsoft Edge in version 109, the last edition that offers support for the old operating systems. After that, there will be no more updates, not only for the operating systems, but also for the browser. In fact, on February 7th, Google will also stop supporting Windows 7 and 8.1 for its Chrome browser.
Browsers are also becoming increasingly insecure
With the end of support for the operating systems themselves, support for WebView2, the component that developers use to display web content in their programs, also ends. Of course, the browsers continue to work in connection with Windows 7 and 8.1, but they are gradually becoming more and more insecure as updates are no longer provided. At the moment there are probably less than 100 million computers running Windows 7 worldwide. In a survey by Lansweeper last fall, there were more computers with Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows 8 than systems with Windows 11. For December 2022, there are Statistics from the company StatCounter the market share of Windows 7 at just over 11 percent. Windows 8.1 is said to run on around 2.6 percent of the PC systems used worldwide.
It’s no surprise that support for Windows 7 will end next week. Microsoft had already announced the end of support in 2020 for most computers used worldwide. Since then, only those customers who have paid for the “Extended Support”, which has been extended by three years, continue to receive updates.
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