Google said it has made an open source version of its Chrome browser for iOS available to developers.
Google says today’s news is the result of year’s worth of work.
“Due to constraints of the iOS platform, all browsers must be built on top of the WebKit rendering engine,” explained Google in a blog post. “
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 has pulled apart the code for iOS and carefully refactored it into the open-source repository. Google says developers can take the core code and use it to compile the iOS version of Chromium just as they already do for Android and other platforms.
Google hopes developers will use the open source version of Chrome to improve web-based features for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
