Google Chrome 37 64-Bit Stable Released, Faster, More Secure
We suspect quite a few folks will be rejoicing over this one. This week, Google announced that its 64-bit experimentation with Chrome in Windows was a success. Thus, it's planning official, bona fide 64-bit support for Chrome Stable once Chrome 37 hits. As you'd expect, benefits in the departments of "speed, stability, and security" are on the top of the changelog. In graphically-heavy benchmarks, the 64-bit version of Chrome has been found to "improve speed," with the VP9 codec that's used in HD YouTube videos boasting a 15 percent improvement in decoding.
Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels have confirmed that "64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content." And, defense in depth security mitigations such as Partition Alloc are able to "far more effectively defend against vulnerabilities that rely on controlling the memory layout of objects."
As of now, 64-bit support is still opt-in, but if you want to give it a go, it's ready to download from Google's own servers. Presently, the only significant known issue is the lack of 32-bit NPAPI plugin support. The 32-bit channel will remain fully supported for the foreseeable future and we will continue to support 32-bit plugins until NPAPI is removed from Chrome.
Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels have confirmed that "64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content." And, defense in depth security mitigations such as Partition Alloc are able to "far more effectively defend against vulnerabilities that rely on controlling the memory layout of objects."
As of now, 64-bit support is still opt-in, but if you want to give it a go, it's ready to download from Google's own servers. Presently, the only significant known issue is the lack of 32-bit NPAPI plugin support. The 32-bit channel will remain fully supported for the foreseeable future and we will continue to support 32-bit plugins until NPAPI is removed from Chrome.
