Google has announced that its Chrome browser for iOS will now be added to the Chromium open-source repository for the community to develop and build.
Back in 2013, Google switched from WebKit to Blink as the rendering engine for Chrome. However, it wasn't possible to do so on iOS, due to Apple's restrictions, which only allow usage of WebKit for any browser developed for the mobile operating system. This made it difficult for Google to release the iOS version of the browser to the Chromium project.
The company has now successfully refactored the code and removed certain complexities that were introduced while making it compatible for iOS. Developers can download the open-source code and build their own version of Chromium for Apple's mobile OS by following the guide provided here. macOS and Xcode are required to create the builds.
Google is said to be seeing faster development of its browser as tests created for Chrome are also used for Chromium code. It will be interesting to see what the open-source community comes up with using the newly released code.
Source: Google via TechCrunch
21 Comments - Add comment