Announcing a new Chromium platform

[Mike Pinkerton]

First there was Windows, then Mac and Linux, then ChromiumOS, then Android. Today we are happy to introduce another platform in the Chromium ecosystem: iOS!

We are all very excited about today’s launch, but it is just the first step down a very long road.

What’s up next?

Like Chrome for Android, we started this project as a fork of the Chromium codebase and our first goal is to unfork and upstream critical portions of the codebase. We have been doing a lot of work all throughout our development on the Chromium trunk to refactor sharable platform-neutral components and increase re-use. Now that we are public, we can continue by adding code that is specific to iOS. The majority of the team will be working on this in the short-term, and you’ll see many new nicks on IRC, as well as the return of some familiar ones.

What are the biggest challenges?

Chrome for iOS has some pretty major technical restrictions imposed by the App Store, such as the requirement to use the built-in UIWebView for rendering, no V8, and a single-process model. As a result it’s been challenging to re-use critical Chromium infrastructure components. That said, there is a lot of code we do leverage, such as the network layer, the sync and bookmarks infrastructure, omnibox, metrics and crash reporting, and a growing portion of content.

What about infrastructure and build bots and try bots, and and and...?

We are actively working with the infrastructure team to get both waterfall bots and trybots for iOS-compiled code. As they become available (hopefully next week), we will send out additional announcements. We also have a large automated testing and performance infrastructure downstream and we will work to upstream the parts that make sense.

Now that we can finally talk about it, we’re starting to add the relevant build, process, and architecture documentation to http://www.chromium.org/developers. Be on the lookout!

How can I help?

In the short term, we need folks who can help review our numerous upstream patches and, of course, the usual counsel and recommendations from the Chromium developer community. Feel free to reach out to us on #chromium or email us if you have any specific questions.

On behalf of the Chrome for iOS Team,

Mike Pinkerton

Casey Whitelaw

Stuart Morgan

Rohit Rao

Milan Broum

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Mike Pinkerton
Mac Weenie
pink...@google.com