Support for older versions of Android (4.4, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0)

[highbaser]

I've recently seen a feature request against Supermium asking for the support of older Android releases. As Thorium has already implemented support of an up-to-date Chromium for legacy OSes like Windows 7 and XP, it would be nice to have the same on mobile. Google deprecated KitKat (4.4) from M83, Lollipop (5.0) from M96, Marshmallow (6.0) from M107 and Nougat (7.0) from M120. Sites in 2024 tend to work well even with M96 Chrome and System WebView, however this is going to change in the future as most websites are based on frameworks which follow the HTML/CSS/JS standards of new versions.

I quoted the original issue below from Supermium's issue tracker.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Android 8.0 is the minimum version Chrome needs to run, but there are still many users with older versions of Android (7.0 Nougat, 6.0 Marshmallow, 5.0 Lollipop and even 4.4 KitKat). Google ended support after Chrome versions 119, 106, 95 and 81 respectively, which was released in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 reapectively. Many websites have glitches in these older versions of Chrome. At worst sites show unsupported browser prompt or do not work at all.

As of 2024 there are over 3.3 billion Android users worldwide, and around 8% of users (250 million) run Android versions earlier than 8.0.

Describe the solution you'd like Backport Supermium 126 to older Android versions (including API level 19, 4.4 KitKat and later) and add code necessary for support.

Although not on chart, there are around 10 million active users using Android 4.4 KitKat.