Michal Marek Google has released an update for the iOS version of its Chrome web browser, and it's an extremely important update. Chrome is now finally powered by the fast rendering engine WKWebView, which until now was only used by Safari and thus had a clear competitive advantage.
Until recently, Apple did not allow third-party developers to use this engine, so browsers in the App Store were always slower than Safari. Change has occurred only with the arrival of iOS 8. Although Google is only now taking advantage of this concession, it is still the first third-party browser. But the result is definitely worth it, and Chrome should now be much faster and more reliable.
Chrome is now much more stable and crashes 70 percent less often on iOS, according to Google. Thanks to WKWebView, it can now handle JavaScript as fast as Safari. A number of benchmarks also confirmed the comparable speed of Chrome to Google Safari. However, some users are not happy that the significant improvement of Chrome only applies to the iOS 9 system. On older versions of iOS, the use of the Apple engine is said to be not an ideal solution for Chrome.
Chrome is now, for the first time, a completely equal competitor to Safari in terms of performance. However, Apple's browser still has the upper hand in that it is the default application and the system simply uses it to open all links. Of course, there's nothing Google developers can do about it, but many third-party apps already let users choose which browser they prefer and automatically open links in it. Also, the sharing menu can help bypass Safari.
