Chrome For Mac Drops 32-bit Build

jones_supa writes Google has revealed that it's launching the finished 64-bit version of Chrome 39 for OS X this November, which already brought benefits in speed, security and stability on Windows. However at this point the 32-bit build for Mac will cease to exist. Just to make it clear, this decision does not apply to Windows and Linux builds, at least for now. As a side effect, 32-bit NPAPI plugins will not work on Chrome on Mac version 39 onwards. The affected hardware are only the very first x86-based Macs with Intel Core Duo processors. An interesting question remains, whether the open source version of Chrome, which is of course Chromium, could still be compiled for x86-32 on OS X.

Comments

Re:Requirements ?

[gnasher719]

Switching to 64 bit builds means that they will have to drop OSX 10.6, right? It's about time this one is left behind!

No, 64 bit builds run on 10.6 just fine. You may be confused here: 10.7 requires a 64 bit processor. So if you don't support 10.6, then supporting 32 bit is pointless - anything running 10.7 upwards supports 64 bit.

What isn't supported anymore is machines with 32 bit processor.

It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate Chrome, and although I refuse to use Google's offerings (including their search engine), I can't blame them for doing what they're doing. Everyone should expect them to act in a way that will further their interests.

If anyone is to blame, I think it should be Mozilla. Firefox had 35% of the market a few years ago. They provided real competition to IE and the other browsers. But then once Chrome started making some inroads, mostly by drawing away IE 6 users, the Mozilla devs went stupid and decided to clone Chrome in every respect.

We now live with the outcome that resulted from these awful decisions. Firefox is now just a poor imitation of Chrome, offering almost no original functionality. Firefox has become unusable for many people, especially those of us who dislike Chrome's philosophy of how a browser should act and behave. None of these changes have brought any new users to Firefox. Firefox is still slower and more bloated than its competitors. And because of all of these factors, users have had to leave Firefox for a better browsing experience elsewhere. Even IE 11 is providing people a better browsing experience than Firefox is for many people these days, as awful as that sounds.

Now that Firefox has less than 10% of the browser market, it has basically no influence over how the other more dominant browser developers have to act. Google, Microsoft and Apple don't have to give a fuck what Mozilla and its users want, because there are comparatively so few of them.

It didn't have to be this way. A few years ago, Mozilla could have kept developing Firefox with an independent mindset. Instead of cloning Chrome, Firefox could have continually improved the browsing experience. Its performance could have been improved, and its memory usage decreased, instead of its UI being trashed. It could have been a browser that perhaps 30% to 40% of users use. Chrome, rather than getting all of these Firefox refugees, would itself only have perhaps 30% to 40% of the market, instead of almost totally dominating it like it does today. IE would be less significant of a player than it is today.

Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[cryptoluddite]

You're just whining about minor cosmetic changes. The reason why Firefox lost share is because for a long time it was much slower at JavaScript, it had memory leaks, the interface would freeze when doing anything, pages didn't render quickly, and so on. None of that was something that Mozilla could easily fix because it was baked into the DNA of the browser.

They have put in the hard work to fix these things. Regular JavaScript in Firefox is as fast or faster than in Chrome and asm.js is much faster in Firefox. Memory leaks are almost all gone. The interface freezes sometimes, but not nearly as much. Pages render much faster.

The real problem for Firefox is not the interface changes that people like you whine about, it's mobile. Now 30% of traffic is mobile and Firefox doesn't have an app for any Apple mobile devices and is effectively excluded from Android by Google's Microsoft-like illegal anti-competitive licensing deals with manufacturers (you can get the app, but it's not preloaded and only a few geeks ever would). They're also up against a massive advertising campaign, with every Google property having a huge pop-up like ad telling users to use Chrome. Chrome users don't see this, but Google is doing everything they can except adding the words "or else".

Mozilla is doing a great job with Firefox, but they are up against a billions-dollar corporation that has set its sights on owning all the means to access the web that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year and is willing to break the fair competition laws to do so.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[ArcadeMan]

Firefox had 35% of the market a few years ago.

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing that Firefox is supposedly "faster" than Chrome, but any time I've tried the latest version of the two on the same system Firefox is always obviously slower. It doesn't matter if it's Windows or OS X or Linux. Chrome feels zippy and fast and light. Firefox lags and makes me wait and wastes my computer's memory. Show me cockamamie microbenchmarks if you must, but for real world usage I do not think that Firefox is anywhere comparable to Chrome. I know it, the market knows it, and that's why Chrome is widely used while Firefox flounders in the shitter.

And I don't think that Google is acting anti-competitively at all. They're throwing millions upon millions upon millions of dollars at Mozilla each year, for Pete's sake! Oh, malicious mockery, Google are directly funding their most ardent enemy! If Mozilla can't put this ample funding to good use developing a competitive browser, then it is, as the GP indicated, purely Mozilla's fault.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is "doing a great job with Firefox"? Huh?

Let's look at the facts:

- The Firefox UI changes are far more than just "minor cosmetic changes". They totally ruin the user experience for many users. For others, they just make Firefox harder to use efficiently.

- Firefox is still slower than Chrome and even IE these days.

- Firefox still uses more memory than Chrome and even IE these days.

- Firefox on Android is rather bad, and has very few users.

- Firefox on iOS isn't even an option.

- Firefox OS is crippled and useless. It consistently gets horrible reviews. It doesn't run any useful apps. It limits developers to only using JavaScript.

- Firefox's share of the market is under 10% now, and it's still dropping.

When I look at those facts, it's one failure after another. And this is with Google throwing huge sums of money at them!

Failing like that time and time again, while having almost endless financial resources provided by a third-party who gets comparatively little in return, is not what I'd consider "doing a great job".

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[AmiMoJo]

Mozilla have not paid enough attention to the things that make Firefox unique. The add-on API has been neglected and many useful ones no longer work and the authors have no intention of updating them. Why don't Mozilla adopt and fix the popular ones? Why not clean up and improve the APIs to offer a bit of security?

Unique features like tab groups have been abandoned, and I think that particular one is slated to go away at some point. They say no-one uses it but that's because no-one knows it's there. Performance sucks too and it hasn't improved like everything else.

There are no compelling reasons to use Firefox any more, except for a few unusual cases like Tor and obscure add-ons.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[nashv]

His argument is that Chrome comes pre-installed and therefore requires less effort to use. Since it doesn't give the average user a reason to complain, nobody bothers looking for a browser.

It's the same 'How IE preinstalls killed Netscape' argument.

Re:As someone with a white macbook...

[nashv]

Considering the stable is currently at version 37, you still have about 4 weeks. Surely, 4 weeks is enough to buy a Chromebook, no? *evil grin*

Re:Requirements ?

[OzPeter]

Switching to 64 bit builds means that they will have to drop OSX 10.6, right? It's about time this one is left behind!

No, 64 bit builds run on 10.6 just fine. You may be confused here: 10.7 requires a 64 bit processor. So if you don't support 10.6, then supporting 32 bit is pointless - anything running 10.7 upwards supports 64 bit.

But there is also the corner case of machines like I have with a 64 bit capable CPU but only 32 bit EFI for which I am endlessly trapped on Lion (10.7). Which probably doesn't count in this case, but is always a source of endless bitching for me.

Re:It did?

[Tailhook]

Here is a post from the Chromium Blog that explains how 64 bit improves Chrome. Incidentally this applies to software generally, not just Chrome. The key part of the post that explains the expected improvements:

64-bit Chrome has become faster as a result of having access to a superior instruction set, more registers, and a more efficient function calling convention. Improved opportunities for ASLR enhance this version’s security. Another major benefit of this change comes from the fact that most programs on a modern Mac are already 64-bit apps. In cases where Chrome was the last remaining 32-bit app, there were launch-time and memory-footprint penalties as 32-bit copies of all of the system libraries needed to be loaded to support Chrome. Now that Chrome’s a 64-bit app too, we expect you’ll find that it launches more quickly and that overall system memory use decreases.

While you may appear to be using more RAM because the 64 bit Chrome processes are larger than the 32 bit, the net memory usage should be the same or less because 64 bit Chrome will not pull the 32 bit stack into RAM to operate. ASLR is a security technique that mitigates vulnerabilities that appear in applications and libraries; lack of a form of ASLR is among the reasons Heartbleed became a thing.

So stop quibbling and use modern software. If you are experiencing a RAM shortage — as opposed to obsessing needlessly over monitoring tools and being difficult — then get more RAM or use a less demanding browser; Chrome use more resources than its contemporaries and makes no apologies for it.

Re:Requirements ?

[ArcadeMan]

I am hanging out for a new Mac Mini model (and have been for 12 months)

Good news everyone, the new Mac mini is almost certainly coming (and has been since december 7th, 2013).

Re:intel atom systems keep 32 bit systems around

[ArcadeMan]

Dude, 1994 wasn't 20 years... oh crap, I'm old.

Get off my lawn!

Re:It did?

[viperidaenz]

What about the people who exploit bugs after they're been disclosed and fixed? They're people too!
If no one stayed on old unsupported software, that entire industry would collapse. Think of the job losses all over Romania, Russia and Nigeria.

Re:Tell my Grandma

[CrashNBrn]

Then I guess she wont mind using a browser thats 10 years old either.

independent support

[tverbeek]

Why would there be any question that Chromium could still be compiled for 32-bit CPUs? It it's open-source, it can be. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to do it.

The Firefox devs walked away from PPC processors some time ago, but there's enough interest in that platform that an independent fork of its code has been maintained.

Re:As someone with a white macbook...

[jellomizer]

Being that your 32bit Macbooks are 8 years old.
You really should expect to not get much updates in any software what so ever.
I am surprised that Google had 32bit mac support.