Google is launching a new version of Chrome for iOS today that promises to be both faster and more stable than previous versions.
According to Google, Chrome 48 for iOS now crashes seventy percent less often and the browser should feel more responsive. JavaScript execution is also now significantly faster.
Until today, Google still used Apple’s UIWebKit framework. While that allowed apps to render web pages (which is essentially what Google did), it was sandboxed (for security reasons) and JavaScript performance especially suffered under this model.
Now, Google has switched to WKWebView, which Apple introduced with iOS 8. It’s been a while since iOS 8 was state of the art, but Google notes that migrating to WKWebView “brought significant challenges.” Specifically, Google notes that the new framework didn’t feature an obvious way to manage cookies and form and SSL handling was also problematic. iOS 9 fixed some of these issues and now the team is ready to make the switch official.
Thanks to moving to the new framework, the browser isn’t just faster, but also more stable — and even when a page crashes, the app itself now doesn’t crash anymore. Instead, it will simply display an error page, just like on the desktop.
While having the browser crash less often is great, it also now features faster JavaScript speeds. Switching between pages now also causes fewer reloads. Google also says scrolling should now be faster and more responsive.
