Google announced on Tuesday that it is adding the code for its Chrome browser for iOS to its Chromium project, making it available through the company’s open-source repository from now on.
Google says the Chrome for iOS code was kept separate from the rest of its Chromium project due to the “additional complexity” of the browser’s requirement to be built on top of Apple’s own WebKit rendering engine.
Due to constraints of the iOS platform, all browsers must be built on top of the WebKit rendering engine. For Chromium, this means supporting both WebKit as well as Blink, Chrome’s rendering engine for other platforms. That created some extra complexities which we wanted to avoid placing in the Chromium code base.
Given Chrome’s commitment to open-source code, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years making the changes required to upstream the code for Chrome for iOS into Chromium. Today, that upstreaming is complete, and developers can compile the iOS version of Chromium like they can for other versions of Chromium. Development speed is also faster now that all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire Chromium community and automatically run any time that code is checked in.
While Chrome users shouldn’t notice any obvious changes to the browser, the change will make it easier for Google to release new versions of the Chrome browser for the iOS platform.
Chrome for iOS is available free for iPhone and iPad device, in the App Store. [GET IT HERE]
