[wavephorm]

Is Chrome for iOS open source? Would there be a way to add V8 back in and release it on Cydia? That may extend the lifespan of Apple products indefinitely. My iPad 1 is already deemed obsolete by Apple and will never receive another web browser update ever, which is obviously retarded. Apple seriously needs to get that giant stick out of their ass.

[saurik]

a) AFAIK, no (as in, it is not open source). b) The change would not just be to mess with the JavaScript engine: it would require totally replacing out the UIWebView backend they are currently using from Apple and, well, pretty much putting back Chrome. They are not rendering the HTML, Apple's UIWebView class is; it would probably be easier to just attempt to recompile/replace JavaScriptCore system wide to stub into v8. c) According to Apple (whom you may or may not believe), v8 is not actually much faster (if not slower) than Nitro right now, so you may as well just turn on Nitro in Chrome (which is easy to do on a jailbroken device).

[superasn]

> so you may as well just turn on Nitro in Chrome (which is easy to do on a jailbroken device).

I know you may mean that it is easy to implement this but just checking if there already exists something which can do this. I searched Google and Cydia with no results. This definitely can be very very useful to a lot of people, esp hackers.

[saurik]

I believe it is just a matter of adding the "dynamic-codesigning" entitlement. I started typing up instructions for how to do it with a few shell commands, but then I ran into a limitation with my ancient version of codesign_allocate that caused me to fail. :( You should definitely be able to do it from a Mac fairly easily, however.

[lparry]

I'd also love any pointers for how to do this; I've been checking cydia daily waiting for a hack that does this

[bnr]

a) http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instruction...

[wavephorm]

  v8 is not actually much faster

I'm not concerned about raw performance. I'm concerned with Apple forceably making iPad 1 (along with all older devices) unnecessarily obsolete by restricting the web browser on the device.

A really good example is the iPad 1 is still using an obsolete version of the WebSocket protocol. That means web servers that want to support iPad 1, must run libraries that support an outdated version of the protocol (one that contains security vaulnerabilities). The protocol can never be updated because Apple won't allow new web browsers on the device. It's a two-pronged approach which both forces obsolescense, and forces developers to needlessly add backwards compatibility layers to cover all the bases.

This is many times worse than the nightmare web developers have been facing with IE6, IE7, and IE8 support requirements because in those cases there was always the option of installing another browser, or something like Chrome-frame.

[jdboyd]

So, an iPad 1 running the latest iOS still is stuck with an old WebSocket implementation?

If correct, that is just astoundingly crappy!

[wavephorm]

Even iOS5 uses the the hixie-76 draft protocol from 2010.