Exploring the Possibilities of Blink Engine on iOS: Google's New Experimentation Effort

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“Google to Bring Greater Browser Flexibility to iOS with Blink Engine Integration”

A new experimental effort in Chrome aims to run the correct Blink engine on iOS instead of Apple’s required WebKit engine.

On iOS, all web browsers, including third-party ones like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, must be built on the same WebKit browser engine as Apple’s Safari browser. In comparison, Android (among many other platforms) allows all alternative browser engines. Open web advocates have long argued that Apple’s limitation stifles any meaningful competition between web browsers on iPhones and iPads.

A new project discovered by The registry, is poised to shake up the status quo of browsers on iOS, or at least lay the groundwork for future changes. In a publicly viewable post on the Chromium Bug Tracker on Jan. 31, the team announced that they were beginning efforts to port the full Blink engine from Chrome/Chromium to iOS.

For now, the Chromium team is clear that this isn’t intended to be part of a “shipping product” – after all, any browser that doesn’t use WebKit would be against App Store policies. To that end, the current plan is to only port the scaled-down “content_shell” application rather than anything resembling the full Chrome browser experience.

This barebones browser is used by the Chromium team to test how well Blink and other necessary components of the browser run on iOS.

This experimental application is used to measure graphics and input latencies by providing traces for analysis.

Experimental only, no launch failure for a shippable product.

In a statement to The registrya Google spokesman echoed this view.

This is an experimental prototype that we are developing as part of an open source project aimed at understanding certain aspects of iOS performance. It will not be available to users and we will continue to follow Apple’s guidelines.

The question that needs to be asked is, of course, “Why? At first glance, leaving Apple’s App Store policies unchanged may seem like a waste of effort. On the other hand, however, building this foundation could make it possible to make the benefits of an alternative browser tangible on iOS. And should those guidelines ever change, Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers) would be off to a good start towards iOS.

The Chromium team plans to give interested developers instructions on how to build the Blink engine and content_shell themselves to try out on their own iPhones and iPads. Community contributions to the project are also welcome.

Google’s Chromium team, in particular, has been pushing the Blink to iOS port full steam ahead, rolling out dozens of related code changes over the past week. At the pace things are progressing, we may get our first glimpse of the browser engine for Chrome — and Microsoft Edge, Opera, and more — running on iOS in the coming weeks.