It's not debunked, rather, as the Wikipedia article states, is not entirely true. But your average application will, at most, only see around a 15% speed increase, and that's assuming it's written from scratch to support the architecture. A 64-bit twitter app or email client won't be any faster than a 32-bit one.
Browsers kinda fall in between. They won't see a huge boost in performance going 64-bit, but they could end up being more stable if they're designed right.
This was exactly my point. The differences in a BROWSER for browser operations are going to be almost negligible and very hard to notice. Handling larger data chunks like big video and huge pictures would show marked improvement, like I said. I never said it wasn't a good idea to move to 64-bit in the long run (Apple probably won't support 32-bit apps forever), but this guy is acting like they were a bunch of 20th Century C64 programmers for not moving Chrome to 64-bit for the Mac until now. To get a 3% speed increase? No. They're looking to the future where both Windows and Mac won't support 32-bit apps. They aren't "late" with it. It simply wasn't their first priority and rightly so (same for coming late with apps for the Mac as it's a TINY part of their overall target audience).
In all honesty, that Wikipedia article isn't saying ANYTHING NEW from seven years ago. There were small gains to be had back then too. Most apps, especially early ones wouldn't take much advantage of them. Apps like Photoshop were a big exception for huge files. Small encoding loops, etc. offer potential gains and perhaps some video codecs that handle HD resolution video, but unless all you are making is a Handbrake type App, your typical day-to-day application probably isn't going to be doing a lot of that all of the time. That doesn't mean you won't get SOME improvement, but it's not going to be earth shattering overall, certainly nothing to scream about for that slow pokes taking forever to finally release 64-bit apps (hell it was only a few years they got a version of Chrome out for the Mac PERIOD and it wasn't like they had a Windows 64-bit version out either).
Compare a 32-bit browser to a 64-bit one of the same release branch. See what kind of gains JUST the 64-bit build has. The data I'm seeing suggests very little speed gains at all except for HD Video codecs where there does seem to be a 15% speed gain (which jives with the small loop decoder information above for that section of code). That's nice, but it's not earth shattering. It is free to consumers, at least. A typical web page will see little to no difference.
The raging reactions over small things I keep seeing on here more and more often is nothing new in society, though. I see more and more EXTREMISM in today's society from politics and religion (obvious in the news) to apparently tech news as well.
Mountains out of mole hills is what I see.
Insults over tiny speed differences. What have these people done in life that gives them the right to criticize someone else's work for taking too long?
One other downside of 64-bit apps like browsers (and operating systems as Windows users found out with early 64-bit Windows versions) is that it tends to break other things like plug-ins that haven't been updated and in many cases will NEVER be updated to support 64-bit operation. You'll have to learn to do without. What? No Silverlight support in Chrome anymore? Aw, too bad.
