Google has been working on a 64-bit version of the Chrome browser for some time now, and with the release of Chrome 37 today, a stable build of the 64-bit browser has been released into the wild. For those of you on a compatible 64-bit system, the 64-bit version will offer performance improvements as well as security and stability enhancements.

Through the use of a more modern instruction set and the latest optimizations, the 64-bit version of Chrome is especially speedy in media and graphics workloads. Google is reporting that VP9 video decoding, for example, is 15% faster on 64-bit Chrome than on the 32-bit variant.

Chrome's security systems have been improved in the switch to 64-bit thanks to having access to a larger pool of memory. By randomizing the location of items in memory, bug exploits are difficult to create, and with more memory to work with, the process becomes even harder.

Stability has also been improved, according to Google engineer Will Harris. In their testing of beta versions of Chrome 64-bit, the development team discovered that the browser crashes around half as often as the 32-bit version when processing web content.

Chrome 37 also finally brings the stable release of DirectWrite graphics in the browser. This means that on Windows machines fonts will now render in more attractive fashion, reducing aliasing and blurriness in many situations.

The update to Chrome 37 will happen automatically for most users, however if you want to get the 64-bit version, you'll have to manually download the variant from here.