New Chrome for iOS is finally as fast and stable as Safari

Enlarge / Chrome for iOS running on an iPhone 6S. Expect big speed boosts after today's update. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Google Chrome 48, which is being released to the browser’s stable channel today, is just another incremental update for most of the browser’s users. For Chrome users on iOS, however, it’s a big one—possibly the biggest single update since the iOS version was first released back in 2012—and it’s all because of an under-the-hood switch.

The short version is that Chrome 48 on iOS will be as fast as Safari on iOS for the first time ever thanks to a switch from iOS’ UIWebView rendering engine to the WKWebView engine introduced in iOS 8 back in late 2014. If you don’t spend your time reading Apple’s developer documentation, we’ll walk you through the state of third-party Web browsers on iOS and just why this change is such a big deal for Chrome users.

Third-party browsers on iOS

On Android and the major desktop platforms, different browsers use different rendering engines. Safari uses WebKit, Microsoft Edge uses Chakra, Chrome uses Blink, and Firefox uses Gecko. On iOS, Apple has never allowed third-party browsing engines. Developers can build browsers, but they’re always just wrappers for the platform’s Webkit-based first-party engine. The oldest API for this in iOS is called UIWebView.

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