Google Chrome will now be an open-sourced browser on Apple’s mobile platform. Apple has confirmed that its team spent a lot of time over the past several years in making the necessary changes required to upstream the code for Chrome on iOS into Chromium.
So why was Chrome for iOS kept away from the Chromium project while the Android version joined Chromium back in 2015?
- Here’s your answer… The iOS version of the browser is built on top of the WebKit rendering engine instead of Google’s Blink engine. Due to the constraints associated with iOS, all browsers must be built on top of WebKit rendering engine
The upstreaming for the code has now been completed and developers can now compile the iOS version of Chromium just like they do for other platforms.
In other closely related news, Chrome 56 has recently been rolled out for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version of the desktop browser notably flags certain HTTP websites as unsafe in the address bar and also puts HTML5 as default over Flash for all users.
