With the advent of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple's first 64-bit consumer OS, all the major web browsers (Safari, Firefox, and Chrome) have become 64-bit. What is the advantage of a 64-bit browser over a 32-bit one on Mac? Even though Windows also has 64-bit versions of their OS, most Windows users are still running browsers in 32-bit mode. I understand the need for 64-bit computing in data intensive programs like Winrar, which need bitwise manipulation, but I don't see why a browser would need 64 bits per integer.
Answer
The probably most important aspect is:
64-bit browser use 64-bit plugins while 32-bit browsers use 32-bit plugins.
Keeping this in mind, a 64-bit browser is both good and bad:
Usually, 64-bit plugins are harder to find as their 32-bit counterparts.
Plugins like the Java Runtime Environment let your browser perform CPU intensive and/or memory hungry tasks. The 64-bit version of JRE has access to all cores, making some tasks magnitudes faster.
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