I presume that Chromium decided to support Windows 2000 when the
project started in 2006. The reasons may be:

(1) The profit is big. There were 6% Windows 2000 users in 2006.

(2) The cost is small. There should not be too many differences
between Windows 2000 (5.0) and Windows XP (5.1).

Afterward, Chromium decided to cut out Windows 2000 when the project
grew up in 2008. The reasons may be:

(1) The profit is small. There were only 2% Windows 2000 users in
2008. Surely, there would be fewer users in future. Furthermore, most
of these remaining users were in corporate environments that were
locked-down against using chrome as a third party program.

(2) The cost is big. Certain of functions need to be implemented
cumbersomely for compatibility with Windows 2000. Moreover, some
undocumented features of Windows 2000 lead to extra failures. For
example, when initializing an impersonated thread of a restricted
sandbox process, nt!ZwMapViewOfSection succeeds on Windows XP, but
fails as 0xc0000022 STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED on Windows 2000.

Is it right?

cpu wrote:
> Yes, the real reason is that there is an ongoing cost of keep that
> version working including extra QA cycles for each release. In terms
> of supporting a windows version with very few users we should focus
> our efforts on Win7.
>
> But you are welcome to keep an external fork. If there is any
> consolation, this was argued at length a year ago.
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