Mac Browsers: Webkit vs. Safari

Browsing the web on the mac has always been a interesting endevour. The web has long been designed for the PC and specifically Internet Explorer 6. When Microsoft ended developement on IE5 for the Mac, we lost a valuable tool in our toolbox for compatability. Now, we mac users are routinely forced to surf with multiple web browsers switching from Safari's great user interface to Firefox for compatability, and Camino for speed. I'm not going to go into all of the different browsers here, instead I'll just point you to this article over at Macintalk with some benchmarks.

What I found most interesting in that article was that they were using the nightly builds of WebKit in substitution for the current Safari browser version 2.0.2. Safari is based off of the KHTML open source rendering engine, and in exchange for using the source Apple is obligated to release their changes to the open source community, and the open source project around Safari is WebKit. As the Macintalk articles shows, this nightly build is well ahead of the other browsers in speed which has been my biggest complaint about Safari.

Installing the nightly builds of WebKit is as easy as you would expect on the Mac, a simple drag and drop you your applications folder is all it takes. The first thing you'll notice is that the icon for WebKit is the familiar Safari compass with a darker dial and a gold rim which is nice for differentiating it in your dock from Safari. Upon opening WebKit you will see your homepage has been replaced by a WebKit launch page instructing you how to report bugs, contribute to the program, and notifys you if there is a new build of the browser. Don't worry, the launch page only shows up when you launch the program itself if you simply close the browser window and reopen throughout your daily use your regular Safari home page will appear, but this launch page is really useful for reminding you about a new build of the software if you wish to update.

Webkit itself looks just Safari, it even calls itself Safari in the Apple Menu. All of your Safari bookmarks and settings are automatically transfered into Webkit, and any changes will be shared with Safari. Really you see no difference between Safari and Webkit aside from the speed and compatability fixes though keep in mind these are nightly builds not final releases of a browser so you may find some stability problems some nights. If you aren't interested in actually testing and contributing to the webkit community you might simply find a good stable release and only update it every couple of weeks or so. (I'm running revision 20648)

If you are looking for an easy way to update WebKit every night, I'll point you to NightShift, a utility that will update the new version each night and keep the previous version in an archive just in case a new build is unstable.

All this begs the question, why hasn't Safari been updated in so long if WebKit is so far ahead? The short answer is Leopard. Apple wants to squeeze every performance increase it can out of the OS Update and holding a new version of Safari until then will provide a recognizeable boost for every average user. So download WebKit any enjoy a little piece of what Leopard has to offer.