Google Releases Chrome Browser For iOS Devices

Today at the Google I/O conference, Google announced the immediate availability of an iOS friendly version its Chrome web browser.

For current Chrome users the new Chrome app will provide many of the same features you'd see from current browser. Like the desktop version of Chrome, the iOS app will sync across all of your devices. This means that you can sync all your bookmarks, passwords ect. It even supports the continued reading function. So should you can pull up pages that you looked at on your PC or iPhone via the iPad, or vice versa.

The iOS market has been a tough one to crack from most third party browsers. Apple has set stringent requirement as to what platforms will be supported and how the apps can interact with their mobile operating system. However, more and more companies are working on projects to develop browsers based on Apple’s version of the Webkit (UIWebView) rendering engine.

Chrome for iOS will work on the both the iPhone and iPad and you can download it now from iTunes Chrome for iOS.

Note: It's worth mentioning that while both Safari and Chrome are based on the open source WebKit browser engine, Google was required to use Apple’s version of Webkit (UIWebView) as the Javascript engine for rendering also Chrome doesn’t get to use Mobile Safari’s Nitro Javascript engine, so Chrome may end up running noticeably slower than on your iOS devices than on your desktop or Android devices and it might be considerably slower than Safari.

For Firefox fans, Mozilla has announced their own WebKit based browser, currently called Junior. Details are still very sketchy and there hasn't been much news since the announcement so we don't know when it might be available.

Safari will remain the default browser on iOS, but for many, the option of Chrome will be a welcome change. Other iOS browser options currently include Yahoo’s Axis visual search app, Opera Mini and the Dolphin Browser.