64 bits of awesome: 64-bit Windows Support, now in Stable!

Today, after a successful experiment with Chrome 64-bit Windows in our Dev and Canary channels in June, 64-bit Windows support is coming to Chrome Stable with the release of Chrome 37.

64-bit Chrome offers many benefits for speed, stability and security. Our measurements have shown that the native 64-bit version of Chrome has improved speed on many of our graphics and media benchmarks. For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance. Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels confirm that 64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content. Finally, on 64-bit, our 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.

At this point 64-bit will remain opt-in, so to take advantage of the improvements click on the new “Windows 64-bit” link on the Chrome download page. Currently, 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.

We encourage you to give 64-bit Chrome a try. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback so we can continue to make Chrome the fastest, most secure and stable browser.

Posted by Will Harris, Software Engineer and Embiggener of Bits