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News Google's Chrome for Windows goes 64-bit

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 4 Jun 2014.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. Dave Lister

    Dave Lister Minimodder

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    I've been using a 64bit browser (pale moon) now for about 6 months and haven't seen any difference in speed from chrome 32bit, so i'll be looking forward to trying this new chrome out.
     
  3. Corky42

    Corky42 Where's walle?

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    When i tried 64bit browser, same one as you mention Dave (pale moon) i had problems running 64bit plugins, like flash player. IIRC flash player either didn't do a 64bit version, or it kept crashing when viewing Youtube clips, is 64bit plugin support working better than it did a few years ago ?
     
  4. Dreamslacker

    Dreamslacker Minimodder

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    I've been running Waterfox and more recently (past few months), pcxFirefox. Both are rather stable and I've not encountered any issues except with plug-ins that simply do not work with 64-bit browsers - e.g. Unity player used for some Facebook games.

    One thing to note though, pcxFirefox is a standalone package so you will need to create your own shortcuts and there is no installer to run.

    You obviously need to install 64 bit Java, which should not be an issue. Aside from that, the rest of the extensions from Firefox x86 work just fine for me - Adblock Plus, Tab Mix Plus, Flashgot etc.

    There isn't any real perceptible performance difference between them and regular Firefox except that the browser can use far more memory for caching (both content and closed tabs). I've gone up to ~6GB of memory used so far when loading lots of image heavy tabs.

    Since I'm on 100M/ 50M (and now 150M/ 75M) Fibre since I started using the 64 bit browsers, I can't say for sure that users on slower links wouldn't see a difference.
     
  5. ssj12

    ssj12 Minimodder

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    I have been running FireFox Nightly x64 for ages now. I hope that this move by Google will force Mozilla to move x64 into general production instead of a testbed app.
     
  6. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!
    Thats my main problem with Firefox 32bits, it usually crashes when using 3,2-3,3GB of RAM. A regular 64bits version would be the ideal solution, meanwhile I started using this addon, UnloadTab:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
    It works!
     
  7. Vigilante

    Vigilante What's a Dremel?

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    There's very little reason to worry about 64-bit for Chrome since every tab/extension is hosted in it's own process, meaning the primary limitation for 32-bit (memory) is basically non-existent. However, HEMR will help secure the browser more and requires the extended memory range provided by 64-bit, though the sandbox in chrome mainly mitigates this anyhows.

    As for 64-bit flash, bear in mind that Chrome comes with it's own version of pepperflash that's built and maintained by Google, I doubt 64-bit chrome will be released to stable without it being at least as effective and perform as well as the 32-bit version included with chrome currently. For other plugins, basically only Silverlight (for netflix) and Java, there have been 64-bit versions that are as stable as the 32-bit versions for a long time now. Extensions in Chrome are not binary so they should work properly in 64-bit chrome with no issues.

    Basically, I see this as an evolutionary step instead of revolutionary - the main improvement will be stability and security, potentially performance increases in future depending on how long the 32-bit version of chrome remains maintained for, but nothing we'll see immediately.
     
  8. Dave Lister

    Dave Lister Minimodder

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    I still have problems a bit, my ad blocker works and youtube and other video streaming sites work most of the time, form what i've read there are still a lot of unsupported plugins though.
     
  9. debs3759

    debs3759 Was that a warranty I just broke?

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    Does FireFox Nightly x64 work nicely alongside Firefox x86, or will it replace my current browser? If I can have both running, I'll try out the x64 version for work related stuff :)
     
  10. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    This is decent enough guide to getting multiple different versions of firefox working alongside each other [best practice is to have one profile per version]...
     
  11. debs3759

    debs3759 Was that a warranty I just broke?

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    Even using that guide, i can't figure out how to have both running at the same time. Not sure if I'm having a blonde moment or if i need to just stick with what works :)
     
  12. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    You have your standard FFinstall as normal, you then launch the second one [the x64 version in your case] from the shortcut [with the -noremote flag and pointeing at a different profile folder]...


    It's a bit of a faff but it does work [or it did when I used to run the FF nightlies]....


    EDIT: from what i can recall this is how i had the shortcut

    Code:
    /path/to/x64/firefox -noremote -p /path/to/x64/profile
    And that allowed the second FF to be run alongside the regular FF install without buggering anything up... iirc without '-noremote' the shortcut just opens another instance of whichever version of FF is running...
     
    Last edited: 7 Jun 2014
  13. Dreamslacker

    Dreamslacker Minimodder

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    You will need multiple profiles for it to work. You can concurrently run different Firefox based browsers but only if each instance loads a different profile (use the -p -noremote option).

    What you can do is to clone the profile. To do so, start the profile manager to create a new profile.
    Start this profile once, then close all instances of Firefox (or any variants).

    Head over to the AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles.
    Your first profile containing the customizations (bookmarks and such) should be in the folder ending with ".default". Copy all the contents of that folder to the new profile folder ending with ".<profile name>".
    Overwrite files where necessary.

    Once you've done that, all your bookmarks and such should be replicated to the new profile.

    You can then create separate shortcuts to run whichever browser variant you want as long as you load the different profiles for each instance.
     

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