14 DAY TRIAL // Google announced the 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows back in June, but since then, the company’s developers have been hard at work to refine the app and solve all reported bugs for flawless performance and stability on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.
The Mountain View-based search giant has introduced today the stable version of Chrome 64-bit for Windows as part of the Chrome 37 rollout, promising even faster browsing thanks to the technologies that are available for 64-bit systems. Needless to say, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are the only OS builds supporting the browser.
In a blog post revealed today, Google says that Chrome 64-bit provides “many benefits for speed, stability, and security,” pointing to some statistics to demonstrate that it loads pages faster than the 32-bit version.
“Our measurements have shown that the native 64-bit version of Chrome has improved speed on many of our graphics and media benchmarks,” Google says.
“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.”
Of course, Google Chrome 64-bit for Windows also comes with better security, mostly thanks to new features that are available in modern operating systems such as Windows 7 and 8.
“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,” Google explains.
We’ve already used Google Chrome 64-bit for Windows for a couple of hours and it’s safe to say that it’s indeed faster than the 32-bit version, but not in a way that would surprise you. As far as stability is concerned, Chrome was already one of the leading browsers in this regard, so it’s hard to say whether this new build is superior in any way or not.
And still, it’s pretty clear that offering a 64-bit version of the browser comes in handy to all those who were planning to make the most of their hardware configurations when browsing the web. At the same time, it also helps Google compete against other browser developers, as Mozilla’s very own 64-bit Firefox build is yet to reach the market in stable form.
At this point, Google Chrome 64-bit for Windows is only available as a manual download, so when you go to the official download page, you get the same old 32-bit build. Of course, you can use this Softpedia link to download Google Chrome for Windows 64-bit right away and see what it’s up to.
