Slimjet 64-bit experimental build is now available for download.
Regular installer: http://www.slimjet.com/release/sjtsetup_x64.exe
Portable version: http://www.slimjet.com/release/sjt7z_x64.exe
Chrome also introduced both 32-bit and 64-bit since V37. However, if you install the 64-bit version, it will directly overwrite the 32-bit version. You can’t have both version installed. For people who want to keep 32-bit and 64-bit version side by side, that’s inconvenient and awkward.
We have made tweaks in the Slimjet project so that the 32-bit and 64-bit version can sit side by side on the same system. They share the same profile folder unless you are using the portable version.
According to the Chromium blog, the 64-bit version of the Chromium has the following three major advantages:
- 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.
- Security: With Chrome able to take advantage of the latest OS features such as High Entropy ASLR on Windows 8, security is improved on 64-bit platforms as well. Those extra bits also help us better defend against exploitation techniques such as JIT spraying, and improve the effectiveness of our existing security defense features like heap partitioning.
- 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.
However, we doubt any average user is able to feel significant performance improvement during daily browsing activities. And it’s also worthwhile to mention the catches with 64-bit version
- It won’t be compatible with 32-bit plugins. If you often visit sites with 32-bit NPAPI plugins, we’d advise you to stay with the 32-bit version for now.
- 64-bit version uses more memory due to its wide word width.
The 64-bit version hasn’t gone through extensive testing yet. Be prepared for bugs and issues. If you find any problems, please report to us via the online feedback menu under Help center.