Google Chrome 128, released on Wednesday, does not function without intervention on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver," and Google initially had no plans to fix it.

But following community complaints and The Register's inquiry about the situation, Google says there's been a change of plan.

"We recognize we caught some in the ecosystem off guard by this, and have decided to reverse the change and maintain support for Ubuntu 18.04," a spokesperson for the web giant explained.

"We will publish a build that restores compatibility next week. We do plan to drop support for 18.04 in the future, but will be sure to provide additional notice ahead of any changes."

Version 128 of the browser includes some security fixes, so being able to install that release would be ideal.

Lauren Weinstein, a technology and policy advocate, noted the breakage in a post to Mastodon. Chrome Stable 128, he observed, will not update via apt because the libgcc-s1 system shared library on Ubuntu 18.04 is less than version 4.2.

Standard support for Ubuntu 18.04 ended on May 31, 2023, but long-term support (LTS) is available through 2028. And Google's Chrome help page indicates that Ubuntu 18.04 is still supported, at least as of the time this story was published. But it isn't presently.

"While 18.04 is an older system, many are running with extended support from Canonical that runs through 2028," said Weinstein. "Many of these systems are in crucial applications where upgrading to later Ubuntu versions is not currently practical."

Though there are workarounds, Weinstein said tampering with system libraries runs the risk of rendering the system unbootable.

In an email to The Register, Weinstein added, "Arguments that one should expect Chrome to die when the OS goes EOL (absent extended support) are contradicted by Google's own actions. For example, they continued to update Chrome for many years after Windows 7 went EOL, in fact they kept updating Chrome for Win7 until quite relatively recently."

"If Google intended to obsolete Chrome on these systems, there should have been plenty of warning - but apparently there was none," he said. "Not being able to update Chrome invokes a variety of serious security concerns."

It turns out Google did intend to obsolete Chrome for "Bionic Beaver." The Chocolate Factory's Chromium bug tracker references Weinstein's post and asks whether Chrome's behavior is intentional.

Google's response was to mark the bug report as "Won't Fix."

"Yes, this is intentional," the Chromium developer post says, pointing to a separate entry as an explanation. "Bionic reached [the] end of standard support in June 2023. I understand it has extended support until April 2030 [2028], but unfortunately 12 years of support is too long for us to maintain and prevents us from using newer features unavailable on those systems."

We were all set to propose a revised software lifecycle designation along the lines of "ALTS" (Attenuated Long Term Support), "LTS || Google," or "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" but Google's about-face renders the matter moot.

For those who cannot wait until the official Google fix, Weinstein has presented a fix to update Chrome 127 to 128, though with the usual disclaimer that the success of this browser retrofit operation comes with no guarantees. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/22/chrome_dropped_support_for_ubuntu/