Announcing the Chrome 64-bit Beta Channel for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the Chrome 64-bit Beta Channel for Windows

googlechromereleases.blogspot.com

17 pointsKamiCrit9 comments

64-Bit Microsoft Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#64-bit_edit...) has been a target for Microsoft on the consumer desktop since October 25, 2001. I personally find it pathetic that a story about making a 64-bit version of your program available in 2014 is somehow noteworthy.

Developers, developers, developers....are apparently just as tied down to the boat anchor of the Microsoft monolith as the OS team is.

Why is this such an achievement? Is 64-bit on Windows so much harder than on Linux, because they have had 64-bit on Linux for as long as I can remember. (I've been using Linux for 3 years)

One major difference is that x64 SEH is completely different and requires function tables to be generated for any JITed code.

It's not super hard, it should mostly just work to recompile. But there are a couple of gotchas:

-Dependencies: 32-bit versions can't be used in a 64-bit process. Open source libs can of course be recompiled but the dependency stack may be deep, and all of them must have been tested with 64 bits. Then there are closed libs (like Adobe's), the suppliers need to be prodded to action.

- The 64-bit Mingw GCC took a loooooooong time to appear in a usable state, not much of a problem for Chrome that can build fine with a Microsoft toolchain.

- The biggest portability headache is that sizeof(void*) > sizeof(long), which is true on 64-bit Windows and just about nowhere else.

And because 32-bit apps run just fine on 64-bit Windows and a conversion gains little benefit for most apps, there is little rush to do anything. So it all goes at a snail's pace.

The only app I have RAM problems with on Windows is Firefox because they haven't got around to process-per-tab. It is pretty dismaying to watch Mozilla constantly postpone both the 64 bit version and multiple processes. I know phones are fun, but one would think that their moneyspinner would deserve better than that.

I've wondered the same thing. 64-bit adoption seems to have been easier on other OSes; which I always attributed to developer adoption. But even the big guns seem to have taken forever to get around to 64-bit applications.

64-bit application adoption on Windows makes the Python 2 to Python 3 acceptance rate timeline look positively fantastic. ;)

I hope this gives Mozilla a little kick to get moving with their 64 bit builds of Firefox for Windows too.

Probably won't until Servo is ready. I'm more interested in Mozilla releasing its sandboxing system already.

Seriously, what's improved by adding 64-bit support to Firefox?

Chrome (on Windows) has been behind the times for a while. No 64-bit support, no HiDPI support. They seem to finally come around and catch up. Thankfully it runs on 64 bit and Retina on a Mac for a lot longer already.

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