Is there any point to giving the option for OSX? When was the last OSX version that did not support 64bit? Is there any reason to prefer a 32bit version on an OSX that supports 64bit?
Real questions, not rhetorical!
If I look at http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel , they list a Windows 32-bit channel and separate 64-bit channel, but only one Mac channel. I'm not sure if this means anything about their release intentions, or if the page may still be updated.
OS X has supported x86_64 applications since 10.5 (Leopard), so there's no problem there if your CPU supports it; moreover, the last OS X release to support 32-bit-only x86 CPUs was 10.6 (Snow Leopard). However, Chrome does support 10.6, so I guess this release may have the effect of dropping support for some Mac models from 2006 that previously worked.
It's customary to give the option when there's an option. If you go to the Chrome download page, there is no longer any option to download the 32-bit version.
I just checked chrome://chrome for updates and it confirmed there was no update and 38 was the latest, but when I re-downloaded chrome from https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/ it was the 64-bit v39 - so yes you do need to install a new version!
I doubt they'd stop updating users just because of this change. It's more likely that they roll out the auto-upgrade in stages, rather than having everyone update all at once.
But that doesn't make sense - if it's true that they will not be providing a 32bit version for Mac from now on. Then most people will be stuck on version 38.
Oddly enough, chrome didn't want to auto-update to this, it was "up-to-date" at 38.x, even quitting and relaunching applied no change. Downloading a fresh `dmg` archive from https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/ applied the 64-bit update.
As far as I can tell, once you've downloaded the 64-bit app, you can launch it instead of the older version and it's an exact drop-in replacement. For example, all my open tabs were restored in the 64-bit process, as they had been in the 32-bit one.
> What about if you had pages open that you don't want to lose (literally hundreds of tabs)?
There's always one of these in every discussion about a web browser. That one person who, instead of bookmarking things, keeps literally hundreds of tabs open.
Then you should first change your browsing habbits, and probably several other ways in which you organize things in general. And ask yourself if you really understand modern technology.
Second, you could save all the open tabs as bookmarks, with the Bookmarks -> Bookmark all Tabs command. It will save all open tabs in a new bookmarks folder.
Lastly, when you reopen the browser after the update, you can click File -> Reopen closed tabs, which will reopen all of those, even if you haven't bookmarked them.
