Google has announced that it has made its Chrome for iOS open source, the code for Chrome on iOS had previously been kept separate from the other versions of the software.
Google has revealed that they have spent a lot of time over the last few years to make changes to Chrome on iOS to enable to to be open source.
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.
You can find out more details about Google making Chrome for iOS open source over at the Chomiun Blog at the link below.
Source Chromium Blog
Filed Under: Apple, Apple iPad, Apple iPhone