Google Open-Sourced Chrome For iOS: Making Easier To Develop Browser For Apple Mobile Ecosystem

Google has announced that the company is making the 'Chrome For Ios' code public after years of keeping it separate from its Chromium project. The Google has open-sourced the browser on Apple's mobile platform and has said that despite the "additional complexity" associated with the platform, its team has spent a lot of time over the past several years to make the necessary changes to upstream the code for Chrome on iOS into Chromium. As we know that the Chromium is the open source platform that shares much of its code with Google Chrome - allowing anyone to examine, modify or compile the code. From now on the Chrome for iOS code has been made available on Chromium repository, so as to make it easier for anyone to develop a browser for Apple's mobile ecosystem.

It must be noted that the Chrome for iOS was kept separate from the Chromium project even though Android version joined Chromium back in 2015 because the iOS version of the browser is built on top of the WebKit rendering engine instead of Google's Blink engine. Google has stated on its blog that due to the constraints associated with iOS, all browsers must be built on top of WebKit rendering engine.

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"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," Google added. "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," Google notes in a blog post. "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," the company said.

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