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Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

code.google.com

41–50 of 84 posts

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#42
post #28

Can anyone here explain the benefits of upgrading to this versus using v38 (32 bit)? Battery life? Less RAM usage? Faster?

With current ram sizes this might be negligible, but 32bit chrome would have to load 32bit versions of all system frameworks, while you have 64bit in memory all the time. The less 32bit apps you have, the better :)

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine they'd force people to use 64 bit via an update. It's customary to give the option. http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Is there any point to giving the option for OSX? When was the last OSX version that did not support 64bit? Is there any reason to prefer a 32bit version on an OSX that supports 64bit? Real questions, not rhetorical! If I look at http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel , they list a Windows 32-bit channel and separate 64-bit channel, but only one Mac channel. I'm not sure if this means anything about thei…

OS X has supported x86_64 applications since 10.5 (Leopard), so there's no problem there if your CPU supports it; moreover, the last OS X release to support 32-bit-only x86 CPUs was 10.6 (Snow Leopard). However, Chrome does support 10.6, so I guess this release may have the effect of dropping support for some Mac models from 2006 that previously worked.

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#44
So wait - I downloaded the 64 bit 39.0.2171.65 version. Because of this, I finally updated my Java version (now 8.25). I still can't java applets to run in Chrome. What gives? I still get Verify Java Version32-bit Chrome does not support Java 7 and later versions on Mac OS X. Java runs only on 64-bit browsers.

http://javatester.org/version.html Gives an error - Java needs your permission to run, but I've already allowed in Java control panel. Ideas?

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#45
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, Mac OS X isn't exactly a priority for them.

I think that for most purposes 32 bit had worked without much issue so it's a matter of cost vs benefit. Can you think of any issues that people face because Chrome was 32 bit? So far I'm seeing Java 8 integration, which is probably a tiny fraction of their users. Also it's not really breaking since those users can just use Firefox for that purpose. They obviously don't consider this a loss.

Security is a big one. 64-bit address spaces are inherently harder to exploit, plus, IIRC, on OS X in particular, ASLR in 32-bit processes has some weaknesses that were never fixed.

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#46
post #33
post #8

Can someone explain why this wasn't done long ago? What are the difficulties of putting out a 64 bit build?

I know for a long time there was an issue with Flash not supporting 64 bit browsers (and a browser without flash was hard to sell)

I don't think this is a real issue? (64-bit firefox supported 32-bit flash, at least on Linux).

Re: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

#50
post #16
post #5

This also fixes the Java 8 support in Chrome on Mac, which didn't work because Java 8 only supported 64-bit browsers: https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/chrome.xml For those of us that still need to access legacy systems (routers, switches, etc.) that have Java interfaces, this is a pretty major upgrade.

I stopped using Chrome because of the java issue. It showed quite clearly that Google has zero regard for Mac users and their concerns

More like it showed quite clearly that Google has zero regard for Java browser plugin users and their concerns.
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