Yeah it was more of a problem back in the day when dial-up and DSL were more common, and home users would often have their computers directly connected to the internet if they didn't have multiple computers and a router. This was especially problematic before XP SP2 came out with the firewall enabled by default.
There is also Supermium which is a relatively recent version of Chromium backported to run on Windows XP with all the security patches that brings, but with that being said I still would not do anything security critical on it.