You say that, but look what Google has stumbled onto trying this path on iOS.

Chrome on iOS is rubbish.

...because the Chrome guys are daft? Nope. ...because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play, so they've deliberately ('not deliberately') made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen, and can only build a poor user experience.

(https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=423444 for the meta bug if you're interested)

> Chrome on iOS is rubbish.

What makes it rubbish? I remember using it when it was released and I switched to it as my main browser instantly. At the time I felt it was better than Safari, if not only for the top bar being smaller and/or hidden, something Safari did not do at the time. It also had the "request desktop" which is invaluable at times.

Currently I use Safari but it's because I haven't bothered since I use the iPhone browser for almost nothing.

its much much slower. scrolling down a page often chokes. changing tabs can take 5 or 6 seconds to re-render. I might have low disk space issues on my iPad, but Safari performs flawlessly.

and its not Chrome's fault. Apple do not allow any other web browser on iOS, so Chrome is just WebKit except you don't get the same javascript engine as Safari does.

I stubbornly continue to use it because I want my history and bookmarks to match my desktop.

iOS has recently opened it's advanced javascript engine to developers which should put App web page rendering speed on par with Safari.

I believe because of other limitations Chrome can't use it anyway and it might take a couple of iOS versions before everything will be solved. For details see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=423444

If they opened their platform up properly, then Chrome could simply use the advanced javascript engine it already has.

I had none of those issues.

I also use my devices jailbroken, and there are fixes for the Javascript engine. That being said, I mostly used it without them, and even when I did I noticed no difference. Again, probably because I use the iOS browsers very little.

Because it's basically Safari with a Chrome skin.

>>> .because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play

This is very similar to what Windows Phone is doing as well. You can't download FF or Chrome on their phones, just other poor IE clones. Granted, IE has come a long way and is pretty decent on Windows Phone, but if I could use one browser across all my devices, I'd be a bit happier.

Is that something Windows Phone is doing, or are Mozilla and Google not making their browsers run on a device with a low market share?

After some more looking around, it seems it was a mutal decision.

Windows started the war when they locked out native third-party code development on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Then in subsequent findings, Chrome lamented they can't get enough privileges with Metro app development to make it work and Mozilla knows MS doesn't want to further their platform - so a sort of stalemate at this point, and a loss to Windows Phone users.

Sources:

Mozilla: No plans to release Firefox for Windows Phone 7 (March 2010)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-no-plans-to-release-fir...!

Google Has ‘No Current Plans’ to Bring Chrome to Windows Phone (August 2014)

http://www.omgchrome.com/no-current-plans-to-bring-google-ch...

Just one more reason to upgrade from iOS to Android. We have real Firefox and real Chrome over here... and have had them for yeaaaars now.

How have they made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen? Does the engine perform differently outside Safari?

Essentially, yes. To elaborate on the linked bug a bit:

You can use UIWebView, the older interface. The biggest problem is that its JavaScript engine is slower than Safari's, and does not JIT compile code (according to Apple, this is for security reasons). I've also seen complaints about scrolling performance.

You can use WKWebView, the newer interface. Its JavaScript engine does JIT, and it boasts 60fps scrolling. Unfortunately, it's missing several features detailed in the bug, including a way to clear and manage cookies, custom URL handlers, POST request bodies missing in certain cases, etc.

One would hope that the WkWebView bugs and omissions will be addressed in future iOS versions, but today is not possible to make an iOS browser that works as well as Safari.

Last I checked, iOS's third-party app policies forbid the implementation of anything akin to a JIT compiler, and even third-party usage of the standard WebView component disables the Nitro JIT. I'm not an iOS dev though, I have no idea if there's been any progress in this space recently.

Yeah, it's seemingly changed since you last checked. Now they allow you to use the Nitroj JIT. I'm not an iOS developer as well, just heard it.

Its changed now with IOS 8, JIT is enabled for WKWebkit

To be precise, it's not that JIT is now allowed in iOS; that would be a security issue because it would basically allow sandboxed apps to create executable memory area, which is considered very bad. On the contrary, what just happens is that WKWebView is piggy-backing on the new extension system to run in a different process, with a different relaxed sandbox, and communicates to the host app with an IPC channel (similar to eg. Chrome extensions). It looks like there are not enough features exposed over this IPC channel to make a fully featured browser, yet.

Sounds like an Apple problem. My current solution to that is to ignore iOS completely. If I really wanted/needed to use iOS, I'd suck it up and use a slightly less performant browser or just use the default browser.

I dunno — to a fair extent Blink is still controlled by Google. Yes, Opera are now doing a fair bit of work, but if Google walked away there would no longer be nearly enough the resources to keep up the pace of development.

A good blink/webkit-browser with the ability to self host sync services for it would go a long way. I think the new opera has that, but it's bad for other reasons..

I disagree. We have plenty of competitors in web browsing area: Chrome, Comodo, Epic, Epiphany, Firefox, IE, K-Meleon, Konqueror, Maxthon, Midori, Otter, QupZilla, Sleipnir, SeaMonkey, and now Spartan and Vivaldi. Why don't they contribute to any established open source project rather than create yet another closed source web browser?