We’re happy to announce that Colab has upgraded its default runtime to Python version 3.8. You can read more about the language changes here.

With this upgrade we’re still a few releases behind the latest Python release (3.11) and we’ll continue working hard to upgrade Colab to support newer Python releases in the coming months.

Colab’s fallback runtime version

Using the fallback runtime version temporarily allows access to the Python 3.7 runtime, and will be available until mid-December. This is available from the Command Palette via the “Use fallback runtime version” command when connected to a runtime. Of note, this setting does not persist across sessions — the command will need to be invoked on each new session.

Please report any problems you experience with the new release here.