For those who like to live on the bleeding edge of the internet, Google is releasing Canary and Dev versions of their popular Chrome browser which properly support 64-bit computers.
Boasting faster and more stable performance, Google has pushed into 64-bit versions as most Windows 7 users now use 64-bit systems. The Canary version is the up to the minute version with new builds pushed out daily. It also might have more instability than the Dev version which is a more stable BETA.
You can grab either version, and Google’s full PR is below.
Try out the new 64-bit Windows Canary and Dev channels
Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Today we’re announcing the addition of 64-bit support to Chrome, with two brand new 64-bit Dev and Canary channels for Windows 7 and 8 users, giving a faster and more secure browsing experience. To try it out, download the 64-bit installer from our Canary or Dev download pages. The new version replaces the existing version while preserving all your settings and bookmarks, so there’s no need to uninstall a current installation of Chrome.
The majority of our users on Windows 7 or higher now have systems capable of running 64-bit applications, and this version of Chrome can take full advantage of these newer capabilities. This includes several improvements that align perfectly with Chrome’s core principles of speed, security and stability:
- Speed: 64-bit allows us to take advantage of the latest processor and compiler optimizations, a more modern instruction set, and a calling convention that allows more function parameters to be passed quickly by registers. As a result, speed is improved, especially in graphics and multimedia content, where we see an average 25% improvement in performance.
- Security: With Chrome able to take advantage of the latest OS features such as High Entropy ASLR on Windows 8, security is improved on 64-bit platforms as well. Those extra bits also help us better defend against exploitation techniques such as JIT spraying, and improve the effectiveness of our existing security defense features like heap partitioning.
- Stability: Finally, we’ve observed a marked increase in stability for 64-bit Chrome over 32-bit Chrome. In particular, crash rates for the the renderer process (i.e. web content process) are almost half that of 32-bit Chrome.
We encourage all our users, especially developers, to give the new 64-bit Chrome a spin, and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback so we can make 64-bit Chrome work great and bring its benefits to our Beta and Stable channel users.
Posted by Will Harris, Software Engineer and Stretcher of Pointers