Google Open Sources Chrome Browser for iOS

Google today announced that it is open sourcing the Chrome Browser for iOS. Previously, the code for iOS was kept separate from Chromium due to the additional complexity required for the platform.

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.

The change should speed up development time as all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire community and automatically run any time code is checked in. You can find the code here.

You can download Google Chrome from the App Store for free.

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