Chrome 48 is available on iOS: Much faster and 70% more stable

With the new update of the Google browser is a candidate as a candidate worthy of Safari Mobile, in some ways the most trusted browser on the Cupertino mobile platform.

With the update released in recent hours Google brings Chrome for iOS multiple enhancements on speed and stability that users have requested for a long time. The company has revolutionized the app for iPhone and iPad with a major innovation: a new page rendering engine. Chrome on iOS now uses WKWebView (first used UIWebView), the same rendering engine of Safari Mobile. It is a possibility that Apple gives by iOS 8, and which brings enormous advantages on the experience of use.

The rendering ” out-of-process ” of WKWebView, Google explains, differently handles cases in which they occur in the web view crash or it runs out of system memory. With previous releases, if the web page crash crashed even the entire application, a phenomenon that during everyday use could also take place several times on devices with little availability of system resources. With the new WKWebView, it will be much less likely to occur, with Chrome 48 that ” crashes 70% of times less “ than previous releases, at least according to the statement released by Google.

The note reads that with the new rendering engine, there are significant benefits in terms of compatibility with web standards (such as feature IndexedDB) verifiable eg HTML5Test which rose from 391 to 409 points. The individual open pages in memory should be less heavy to handle in the background and as a result will be recharged more often than before. During our brief tests, however, we have witnessed a more aggressive management of the tab in the background compared to Safari.

The note reads that with the new rendering engine, there are significant benefits in terms of compatibility with web standards (such as feature IndexedDB) verifiable for example, with HTML5 test, which went from 391 to 409 points. The individual open pages in memory should be less heavy to handle in the background and as a result will be recharged more often than before. During our brief tests, we have witnessed a more aggressive management of the tab in the background compared to Safari.

We tried Chrome 48 on an iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 9.3 beta 2 installed, and there are significant differences from the previous version, so much so that not only reaches Safari Mobile in the two tests that we performed, but even surpasses it with a fair degree. In short, as we can see from the tests, we have run Chrome may be used in place of Safari without reaching many compromises in terms of performance, with the improvements that have led, indirectly, greater fluidity and responsiveness in scrolling the pages.

The only limit is at present inherent in Apple’s mobile platform, as we know, does not allow you to set as the default browser other than the native one. That this is one of the novelties of iOS 10? In our hearts, we hope, although this hope has now lasted for several years.