Web Kit enhances browsing experience


Web Kit LogoApple’s Safari web browser is built around the open source web engine called Web Kit. This is developed by the open source community and updated each and every day (and is recompiled nightly).

This ensures that the browser’s ‘engine’ is the most up to date possible, supporting emerging standards and compatibility. Additionally you benefit from faster rendering of pages and their content.

Web kit is available for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems so the vast majority or users are covered (sorry Linux users!). The Web Kit runs Safari as the front-end application but with Web Kit as the rendering engine running “under the hood”.

To quote the Web Kit site:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60′s S60 WebKit development.

The Web Kit open source home is at webkit.org to download either the Mac OS X or Windows version click on the nightly builds button:

To test your current browser you can run Acid3 Test <- note: this link runs the test. The Acid3 test puts the browser’s rendering engine through a gruelling (but fast) test of it’s abilities, and provides a score out of 100. A ‘perfect’ browser scores a perfect 100%.

The aim of Web Kit is for each nightly build to score 100; although due to the nature of the continuos improvements/amendments sometimes the score may end drop to below the prefect 100%.

For example: my browser safari 3.1.1 only scored 74% but the current Web Kit scored 96% compliance. I dropped the Web Kit back a couple of builds/days and that version scored the magical 100%.

I’m now using the 100% scoring build which equates to release r32530 (AppleWebKit 526.2+) but my vendor provided Safari is build 525.18. Since writing new Web Kit builds will be available.

I’ll check the Web Kit site once a week or so, downloading a build to keep things fresh. Hopefully you’ll do the same.

Enjoy your browsing and cutting edge surfing at blazing speeds!

Richard.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under apple, browers, mac, safari, software, support, tech, updates, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Web Kit enhances browsing experience”

  1. Ian Mac says:
    May 9, 2008 at 7:59 am

    Ah ok I get it – WebKit is effectively Apple’s Open Sourced dev branch from the Konqueror HTML rendering project. So by taking the nightly unofficial builds you’re taking a short cut i.e. rather than await official releases from Apple you’re beta on WebKit?

    I like Safari it renders colour much better than FireFox so it’s good for online image proofing – though I find a lot of java problems in Safari, so for stuff line shopping online, Joomla admin sessions, online banking, I prefer FiFx :-D

  2. Richard says:
    May 9, 2008 at 8:57 am

    I never have any Java issues with Safari and my Mac, have you got all the latest OS updates and the new Java engine? Are you running Safari 3.1.1?

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