Seeing CriOS in your analytics?

What is CriOS and why does it keep popping up on my analytics?

Recently in my google analytics for my site and blog, I have been seeing "CriOS" popup from time to time, and, each time, I discount it as either a foreign browser or a bot crawling my site, but no! It turns out CriOS is in fact "Chrome for iOS", meaning Chrome on an iPhone!

This ends up being a very interesting statistic to have, since now I can compare it with my iPhone Safari hits and see how much Chrome is eating in to the Safari pageview share on my site.

As a user, and a developer, it would be important to know that CriOS doesn't work like normal Chrome for Android (since the operating system are completely different.) It is, of course, based on webkit (just like Chrome for Android/Desktop and even Safari), "However, while Apple allows only Safari to access iOS facilities like the iOS Nitro engine, Chrome uses Apple's UIWebView for loading and rendering content." -- developer.chrome.com

If Chrome for iOS takes off and begins to really compete with Safari as the #1 browser for the iPhone, some considerations may need to be taken with how mobile webapps are built.

Interested in knowing more about CriOS, or want to try it yourself? Click here.