Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

The headline should read Google Chrome Skin now works on iOS. For all intents and purposes, the heart of the browser, i.e the rendering and scripting engines are not running on the iPad or iPhone.

Would it be accurate to state that IE now works on the iPad if Microsoft ported the IE browser chrome(UI) to the iPad?

View on HN

Note that Chrome on iOS does use the Chrome networking stack, which has a lot of enhancements - including SPDY.

But it still feels slower than Safari too me.

> The headline should read Google Chrome Skin

That would be redundant. Long before Google had a browser, the URL bar, buttons, scroll boxes, etc, of a browser (as opposed to the rendering engine) were called chrome.[1]

Developers didn't refer to browser skin, developers referred to browser chrome.

This is — quite literally in the original sense of the term — Google Chrome for the WebKit rendering engine.

1. "chrome: the browser UI around the web page" - https://developer.mozilla.org/Talk:en/Chrome

Google Chrome is built on top of WebKit, so this is rather Google Chrome for Safari.

As I understand it, Google's webkit went in another direction than webkit vanilla.

A browser is way more than a rendering engine. Even if this app was just a skin for UIWebView that incorporated Chrome sync and the look and feel of desktop Chrome, why not call it Chrome for iOS?

Eh, it's WebKit. Not quite the same WebKit, but close enough.

It's not like they are using completely different rendering engines.

There is no WebGL and other HTML5 features that Chrome has. Also, not only there is no V8 JS Engine support, but I suspect that Apple's NitroJS engine won't work in Chrome because it probably uses UIWebView to render sites.

Well, WebGL doesn't work in Chrome on Android either.

True, though that may change soon. And other features like SPDY are already working on Android but presumably not in Chrome for iOS.

Correction: Another comment here says that Chrome is using its own networking stack on iOS, so SPDY is working. However, there are still other differences between Chrome and Safari WebKit, like the Audio API.

Yeah, no WebGL's a bummer. But at least it is close to the same engine.

Come on. It's close to the same engine in the same way Desktop Safari is close to the same engine in Desktop Chrome. You upgrade one, the other remains the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com