Google today announced that the code for Chrome for iOS is now part of its Chromium open source project.
On iOS, Chrome has to use Apple’s WebKit rendering engine instead of Google’s own Blink engine. Because of this, Google didn’t add the Chrome for iOS code to the Chromium code base before. Supporting both rendering engines in the same code base, after all, adds quite a bit of complexity.
Over the last few years, though, Google’s team worked on making the necessary code changes to add the Chrome for iOS code to Chromium. That work is now complete and developers who want to compile the iOS version of Chromium can now take the iOS code from the Chromium repository and do so (assuming, of course, that they run OS X and use Xcode).
Google argues that this move also means that the development speed for Chrome for iOS will now be faster, thanks to the fact that all of the tests the team runs on Chromium can now also automatically run on the Chrome for iOS code base, too.