Opera 12 is the first third-party web browser for Windows to offer an official 64-bit version. (Neither Firefox nor Chrome have official 64-bit versions for Windows. And I think Safari for Windows doesn’t have one either.)
Does this translate to any substantial improvements in speed? Does anyone here know of any benchmarks?
Very unlikely. 64-bit is mostly an advantage if you have to use a lot of memory or are doing processing on actual 64-bit integers.
For the kind of software like Opera (and Firefox and Chrome), the additional registers in 64-bit mode help a little, but that tends to be offset by most pointers now being 64-bits and the L1/L2 caches hence being less effective.
Opera 12 uses a separate process for plugins like Flash and I believe it can actually use the 32-bit Flash within the external process while still displaying the content within the 64-bit browser.
64-bit is not really useful for browsers with multi-process architecture like Chrome. It is very unlikely that a single tab will need 64-bit address space.
Except once you have enought tabs Chrome starts putting multiple tabs in a single process. The cutoff seems to be somewhere in the low double digits. And at that point, you can in fact start running out of address space (not to be confused with running out of memory) without too much trouble, especially because system libraries on 64-bit OSes have a tendency to be mmap-happy, since they think they have lots of address space to work with.
64 bit address space significantly improves the effectiveness of ASLR, 64 bit tagged pointers can store way more data (7 byte strings, dunno if anyone actually does that, though).
I generally find Chrome likes to start falling over around the 3.5GB mark (as measured by chrome://memory) - larger images stop loading, pages stop rendering properly, and eventually it can end up crashing. Address space fragmentation I'm guessing.
This isn't helped much by Chrome's aggregate memory use being about 10x higher than other browsers. Takes a good 2-300 tabs in Opera to break 4GB, takes more like 20-30 in Chrome.
Does this translate to any substantial improvements in speed? Does anyone here know of any benchmarks?