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Comment by travisjeffery | Hacker News Reader

> Google Chrome is nothing more than a UIWebView skin on iOS

Mobile Chrome's networking stack is the same as Desktop Chrome, providing SPDY, prefetching, etc.

"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."

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...

Just wanted to say, great job on the Chrome app.

Only 2 things I don't like about it:

1) Getting at bookmarks requires too many clicks.

2) Sometimes my bookmarks get rearranged on the desktop after I use them in iOS.

Otherwise, great job. Syncing my browser history/bookmarks/passwords is great. And it feels more snappy than Safari, which I didn't think was even technically possible.

Yes, great job. Besides the fast networking part it also feels snappy because of the page snapshot feature. It is also a cool feedback to see reduced colors, when the content has not refreshed yet.

How would you handle the UIWebView networking yourself? THe UIWebView is really opaque, doing everything by itself.

I guess you could download the HTML externally and get it into the view through loadHTMLString:baseURL: , but that would still make the UIWebView load all images etc.

You can replace the global NSURLCache with a custom implementation, and trap all the connections in there. We use it to replace online resources with resources we've prepackaged in the bundle when possible.

You can register a NSURLProtocol to handle networking requests for UIWebView. Some applications use this to provide transparently decrypted local files to a UIWebView.

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