Google Chrome browser has been the open source through the Chromium project, but not for the iOS. The company announced that after keeping Chrome for iOS separate from its project, it now become open-sourcing the browser on Apple’s mobile platform. Google claims that its team spent a lot of time over several years to upstream the Chrome for iOS code into Chromium.
According to the reports, Chrome for iOS was kept separately from the rest of Chromium project because of additional complexity required. The iOS version of the browser in the Apple mobiles built on the top WebKit rendering engine instead of Google’s Blink engine.
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“For Chromium, this means supporting both WebKit as well as Blink, Chrome’s rendering engine for other platforms. Those created some extra complexities which we wanted to avoid placing in the Chromium code base,” Google mentioned in its Chromium blog post.
The upstreaming for the code has completed, and developers can now compile the Chrome for iOS version just like other platforms. As per the company announcement, the development speed also faster that all tests for the iOS are available to the entire community. It automatically runs any time that the code checked in.
After its launch, Chrome for iOS available for free to all the users of Apple mobiles and can download from iOS App Store. The company claims that more frequent updates will help the iOS browser more similar to the Android browser.
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Google recently launched the Chrome 56 for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest version of the desktop browser implemented with HTTP websites as unsafe in the address bar. It also puts the default HTML5 over flash for all users.