After several years of efforts, Google has finally open sourced its Chrome on iOS. The latest development has brought the open source web browser code to the Chromium project to let developers modify its presence just like they can for any of its other versions.
As Apple’s iOS is quite conservative when its comes to open source developments, the code for Chrome on iOS was not kept with the rest of the Chromium project until now. Google also added the WebKit support alongside its Blink rendering engine to match the guidelines of iOS. However, all that brought some “extra complexities” that would be resolved with the open source version.
“Given Chrome’s commitment to open source code, we have spent a lot of time over the past several years making the changes required to upstream the code for Chrome for iOS into Chromium,” Google’s upstream angler Rohit Rao writes in a blog post.
Speeds up development
Google considers that bringing Chrome for iOS to the open source community will make its development speed faster. Since all the tests for the browser are available to the Chromium project, they can automatically run on the Chrome for iOS code base with a single execution.
You can access the iOS code from the Chromium repository to compile the newest open source offering. This could help you advance your next web project.
