Blink prototype – A Blink-based browser prototype tied to Chromium testing shows a clear win in Web Responsiveness on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26.5.1, with smaller gaps on JavaScript/Wasm and canvas graphics. The creator behind the tests stresses it’s research—not a pro
The browser wars on iOS aren’t waiting for next year.
On June 15. Kyle Pflug—product manager for the Edge Web Platform group—detailed what happens when a Chromium project that reuses the Blink rendering engine is measured against Apple’s WebKit. In his post, the work points to a future where WebKit may finally have serious, performance-level competition on iPhones.
The numbers come from a prototype browser built on a Blink-based foundation that traces back to February 2023. Pflug says the Edge web platform team contributed to Chromium to create the prototype, and that it uses the same rendering engine Edge relies on on other platforms.
Benchmarks were run on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26.5.1, with each result averaged across three runs. In Speedometer 3.1’s Web Responsiveness test, Blink posted a score of 49.27 compared with WebKit’s 38.3—an apparent 28.6% difference.
When it shifted to Jetstream 3’s JavaScript and Wasm throughput testing, the advantage shrank but didn’t disappear: Blink scored 306.35 versus WebKit’s 270.9.
Graphics didn’t swing as dramatically either. In Motionmark 1.3.1’s graphics rendering test of canvas graphics, Blink finished at 4,773.52 while WebKit came in at 4,673.68.
Pflug also tried to sanity-check the speed claim outside the original phone setup. He went to an Apple Store to run Speedometer on an M5 iPad Pro using Safari, and reported a slower score of 45.7 on that hardware.
The takeaway is less about a single sweep than the shape of the gap. Responsiveness moved more than raw compute or canvas graphics, suggesting the prototype’s strongest room to impress may be how quickly the browser feels like it’s responding—not just how fast code runs.
Still, the story isn’t a victory lap.
Pflug said the benchmarks are only part of the picture. and he listed additional “pain points” on a Top Developer Needs dashboard. Those include layout and styling issues such as handling corner-shapes and properly managing “squircles and notches” in CSS. He also called out CSS animation behavior tied to interpolate-size() and calc-size(). which he describes as automatic animating to height. as well as Temporal in JavaScript. which he characterizes as “sane data & time handling.”.
He ends the post with several boundaries: this is a research prototype, the testing is based on his personal device rather than lab results, and there’s no product announcement—no indication of when, or even whether, a Blink-based browser would emerge from development.
That cautious framing matters because it undercuts any temptation to treat these results as an imminent shift on iOS. It also lands right in the middle of a larger change underway: the EU’s Digital Markets Act has forced Apple to allow alternatives on iOS through BrowserEngineKit. bringing WebKit back into a world where it has to defend itself.
This isn’t the only Chromium-related drumbeat from the same month. On June 4, a Chromium blog post said it had set new records in browser benchmarks thanks to Chrome optimizations.
Put together, the message reads like a warning shot. Safari still leads on iPhone, and brand-loyal consumers won’t be pulled away by benchmark charts alone. But the tests show there are other paths—enough to hint that WebKit may no longer be the default assumption for performance on Apple’s platform.
Blink WebKit iOS Chromium Microsoft Edge Kyle Pflug Speedometer 3.1 Jetstream 3 Motionmark 1.3.1 BrowserEngineKit Digital Markets Act Safari performance benchmarks