For the first time, developers have open source access to Google’s Chrome code for iOS. Google built its Chrome browser on source code from its Chromium open source project, but until now that code repository hasn’t included Chrome for iOS.
That was because to build the Chrome browser for Apple’s mobile operating system, Google needed to use two rendering engines: its own Blink engine and Apple’s WebKit engine. While WebKit has been open source since 2005, Google faced “extra complexities” in having to support both engines in its code for iOS, so the company hadn’t previously made it open source.
By contrast, Chrome for Android has been almost entirely open source since 2015. Before that, the Chromium open source project was focused mostly on the Chrome browser for desktops.
Years of Code Changes To Get Here
“Historically, the code for Chrome for iOS was kept separate from the rest of the Chromium project due to the additional complexity required for the platform,” Googler Rohit Rao wrote yesterday on the Chromium blog. “After years of careful refactoring, all of this code is rejoining Chromium and being moved into the open source repository.”
By open-sourcing the Chrome for iOS code, Google has made it possible for developers to compile that code just as easily as they can for other versions of Chrome. That will also help speed up development times for new applications built on the Chrome for iOS code. Rao noted that getting to this point has taken some time because of the fact that Chrome for iOS uses both the WebKit and Blink engines.
“That created some extra complexities which we wanted to avoid placing in the Chromium code base,” Rao said. “Given Chrome’s commitment to open source code, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years making…