Google Chrome Canary for Mac OS X is Now 64-Bit

Chrome announced back in June that its Canary build of its Chrome browser (meant for early adopters and developers) would finally support 64-bit on Windows. At the time, no indication was given as to when other platforms would support 64-bit.

Today, iClarified noticed that the latest version of Chrome Canary 38 of Mac OS X now supports 64-bit! With 64-bit support, Mac users can experience improved speed and stability. It may take some time for Google to roll this out to the beta channel, and eventually their release channel, but it's great to finally see the popular browser support 64-bit!




When the Windows version went 64-bit, there was an average of 25% improvement in performance in an increase in stability. Since there's been no announcement yet on 64-bit for Mac, we aren't sure when the changes for Mac were rolled out, or the specifics on any improvements; however, we've noted some of the changes found in the Windows version below.

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.

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.

To try out Chrome Canary 38 you can head over to the download page here.