A forced choice is only a severe limitation if it’s significantly worse. That’s currently a guess as there are no iOS comparable options to consider at this point in time.
Further, Google has a competitive interest in eventually crippling their iOS rendering engine.Then again I don’t use desktop Crome so that could be my bias talking.
No, they wouldn't ever do that. That would be like making an anti-demo. Google has an interest in getting as big a market share for their browser as they can. In as much as disabling their web application functionality of you do not use chrome.
Android is much less relevant than the browser.
And this does not even begin to touch on Firefox.
The problem is a policy one, with Apple really liking their walled garden and veto rights to any design.
For sake of argument lets’s suppose Android Crome was a 90 and iOS Crome is currently a 70 due to the rendering engine. In theory they could replace the engine and hit say 85 given enough resources. But, they could also replace the engine hit 75 and blame iOS. Their still demonstrating an improvement and intentionally crippling it at the same time.
That said any such measurement is arbitrary. I personally like having a unified rendering engine because it’s less testing when developing mobile websites. There is no way to improve that situation by introducing a new engine.
Technically they are not introducing a new engine. Chrome is well established with a 60-70% market share. Not saying thats a good thing either...
But you have a very pro-apple and anti-google way of thinking here which I think misguided and does not actually benefit you. Even with those made up numbers chrome would improve from 70 to 75 which is by all means a win for the consumer (you!) but you are ready to dismiss it as it might be bad for Apple.
I edited the post to make it clear I don’t think Crome has a better engine having seen many issues on android phones. I was simply saying if they had advantages on other platforms you can’t assume they will carry over.
Anyway, I still test and find different issues with Crome on Android tablets, phones, and desktop due to significant market share and I would do that for iOS Crome. Sure, Chromes developer tools helps fixing some of these but I have had various CSS issues not replicate.
However, most companies don’t do this so adding more rendering engines with slight bugs seems to make things worse for consumers. There may be short term benefits, but long term it’s a net loss as many developers would only support a subset of iOS users.
Further, Google has a competitive interest in eventually crippling their iOS rendering engine.Then again I don’t use desktop Crome so that could be my bias talking.