Ericsson has open-sourced its experimental Bowser browser and released it (again) for iOS. Not only will this twin-pronged move provide the only WebRTC-supporting browser for Apple’s mobile platform, but it will also give developers an alternative to Google’s implementation of the promising standard.

WebRTC is a neat piece of HTML5-based technology that allows voice and video chat within the browser, without the need for plugins. It can also be used for file transfers and, as the now-defunct private search engine Blippex demonstrated, anonymization too.

[company]Ericsson[/company] first released Bowser in 2012, for both iOS and Android, as the world’s first WebRTC-supporting mobile browser. It pulled the app in February of this year, noting that both Chrome and Firefox now support WebRTC on Android. As Bowser team leader Stefan Ålund wrote at the time: “We do not exclude that we some time in the future will again make a test browser…