As part of the Chrome release, Google open sourced a big portion of Android’s graphic engine code. This code comes from the Skia Graphics Engine that was developed by Skia Inc., a company Google acquired in 2005. It was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and was started by Michael Reed.

This vector graphics rendering software makes highend visual effects possible on feature phones. It is tiny in size and is capable of delivering very high quality. Skia’s engine is the graphics core of both Google Android and Google Chrome.

This is yet another proof point to my theory that Google Chrome is more about the mobiles and less about the desktops. By adding Skia engine to Chrome, Google can ensure good graphics performance on devices that don’t have graphics processing unit.

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