Google announced that they are adding 64-bit support to Chrome with the newest Dev and Canary versions which were released today.

According to the post in the Chromium Blog from Google engineer Will Harris, the move will give Windows 7/8 users a faster and more secure browsing experience. Harris encourages everyone to try it out.

The new version replaces the existing version while preserving all your settings and bookmarks, so there’s no need to uninstall a current installation of Chrome.

The majority of our users on Windows 7 or higher now have systems capable of running 64-bit applications, and this version of Chrome can take full advantage of these newer capabilities. This includes several improvements that align perfectly with Chrome’s core principles of speed, security and stability:

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.

We encourage all our users, especially developers, to give the new 64-bit Chrome a spin, and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback so we can make 64-bit Chrome work great and bring its benefits to our Beta and Stable channel users. No mention of when (or if) the same will be done for Mac, but we will keep our eyes open for it in the event it does.

Another point that Google also argues, according to the TechCrunch article, is that its tests have shown that the 64-bit version of Chrome has been far more crash-resistant than its 32-bit counterpart. Specifically, the renderer process now only crashes half as often as before, according to Google’s own data.

Security also benefits from a 64-bit implementation. 64-bit apps can take advantage of built-in security features like High Entropy ASLR – a way to prevent exploits by putting key data areas of a program into random parts of the computer’s memory so attackers can never know exactly where to find it — on Windows 8, for example.