Google has recently been very vocal about the demise of Google Earth in favor for Google Earth Pro, with the caveat that the Pro version compatibility is with Windows 7 at minimum, essentially barking on Windows XP users.

Just like they did with Chrome last year or so.

And why is that? Google has their orwellian language for this (it's the same than Microsoft's) : they'll cite security reasons, etc.

In fact, the only thing lacking in Windows XP is just the version of TLS that Google would like to use. TLS 1.2 is not more super secure than TLS 1.1, but that gets religious very easily these days. And wait until someone finds a vulnerability in TLS 1.3, when this thing becomes more mainstream this year.

Thing is, all things networks is just a piece of Internet Explorer. And Windows XP can only support Internet Explorer 8 at most. For some reason, Microsoft made sure that XP users can't install Internet Explorer 9. Why? Good question! Perhaps Microsoft wants you to adopt their latest OS, so they've got to create roadblocks for letting you think you have to upgrade your hardware.

This piece of Internet Explorer has the runtime related to TLS. It supports TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. If Google would like Chrome, Google Earth, and in fact other software to support TLS 1.2, perhaps they should add support to the library themselves. After all, Chrome alone depends on a fair number (at least 30) third party libraries, so why not TLS 1.2 or even TLS 1.3 ?

That's an easy thing to do. But Google won't do it. "don't do evil" ? Hmmm...

Behaving like Microsoft won't save Googlers.