If you’re still on a PC that predates 2005, you might be in some trouble. Google is preparing to change its Chrome browser’s minimum CPU requirements to include the SSE3 instruction set in the near future. That means processors older than the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 will no longer support the browser, as anything older lacks the SSE3 instruction set.

In the future, Google wants to use more modern instruction sets with Chrome (specifically SSSE3; not to be confused with SSE3), and in doing so they are forced to increase the instruction set requirements to SSE3. Google also looked at the number of Chrome users running non-SSE3 capable processors and the population was small enough for them to make the change.

This news isn’t that surprising. If you are still working on a system that predates 2005, it’s amazing your system runs at all in the first place. The only real population that will be affected by this change is the retro community, which is already incredibly small, and frankly, they already know the potential problems they’ll encounter trying to run modern software.

We don’t know if this change will affect Chromium-based browsers like Edge, but it seems very likely that it will. Hope for older PCs isn’t lost, however, as Mozilla Firefox has no current plans of making SSE3 a system requirement, so you can always fall back to that web-browser if needed.