After several years of work, Google Inc. has finally added the code for the Apple iOS version of its Chrome web browser to the open-source Chromium project.

Google Chrome on iOS isn’t nearly as popular as Apple’s own Safari browser, which accounted for over 96 percent of all web traffic on the platform last year, but it does at least provide a safe haven for those who are partial to Google’s services.

The reason Google never open-sourced Chrome on iOS before, unlike other versions of its browser, is that Apple has always required third-party browser makers to use the same rendering engine as Safari, which is the WebKit engine. In contrast, the Chrome browser on other platforms uses the Blink rendering engine, which was forked from WebKit back in 2013.

Google said the complexities around this issue had prevented it from migrating Chrome iOS’s code to the Chromium project, until today. “Historically, the code for Chrome for iOS was kept separate from the rest of the Chromium project due to the additional complexity required for the platform,” wrote Google engineer Rohit Rao in a blog post. “Given Chrome’s commitment to open-source code, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years making the changes required to upstream the code for Chrome for iOS into Chromium.”

Apple device users won’t notice anything different, but it should help Google to speed up the development of newer versions of Chrome for iOS. Now, the entire Chromium open-source community will be able to help out with testing new updates to the platform, while third-party developers on iOS will also have a new starting point for building their own browsers, similar to Opera on MacOS.

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