Google has announced the launch of a 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows. It has introduced 64-bit Dev and Canary channels for Windows 7 and Windows 8 platforms.
According to Google, 64-bit helps it “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.”
In addition to performance, Google hopes the 64-bit version will help bring security features by taking advantage of the new OS features like High Entropy ASLR on Windows 8. “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,” adds Google in a blog post.
Users can expect a significant improvement in stability for 64-bit Chrome over 32-bit Chrome. Google claims crash rates for the renderer process (i.e. web content process) are almost half that of 32-bit Chrome.
To try it out, users can download the 64-bit installer from Google's Canary or Dev download pages. The new version will replace the existing version while without changing settings and bookmarks, so there’s no need to uninstall a current installation of Chrome.