Google Chrome on iOS now gets open sourced

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 it, just like they can for any of its other versions.

As Apple’s iOS is quite conservative when it 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 WebKit support alongside its Blink rendering engine to match the guidelines of iOS. However, all that brought about 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 wrote in a blog post. Google considers that bringing Chrome for iOS to the open source community will increase its development speed. 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.