

The latest build of Webkit "has to be seen to be believed." - pius
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/09/the-new-safari-is-amazingly-quick-firefox-watch-out/

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boucher
This is definitely true, the nightly builds of WebKit right now are incredibly
fast. But, the shipping version of Safari is also much much faster than
Firefox 2, and is still faster than Firefox 3 Beta. Safari has come a long way
in a short time, it's an incredible browser.

~~~
pg
It's pretty impressive that Apple can compete with open source. I forgot that
was possible.

~~~
tolmasky
Apple has open source figured out. It's the prefect fusion: the core
technologies (<http://webkit.org>) are open source, but they manage the UI
like no one else can. Software with style, the way it should be. The WebKit
team is absolutely fantastic too, I miss them.

~~~
halo
You make it seem like it's open source thanks to their own good will - it's
based on KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, which was LGPLed.

~~~
tlrobinson
Yes, it started as KHTML, but Apple has taken it to a new level.

The KHTML and WebKit guys have had their differences in the past, but I
believe KHTML is trying to merge all of the WebKit improvements back into
KHTML, hopefully eventually unforking the two:

[http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-
unf...](http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unforking-of-
kdes-khtml-and-webkit)

~~~
boucher
It's also worth noting that Apple could have used a different engine, or
started from scratch.

Similarly, they could have chosen not to open source the darwin kernel, and
they could have based it on something other than BSD.

The point was that Apple seems to know when to choose open source technology
and leverage it, and when to start from scratch and build their own
proprietary system.

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DaniFong
Opera has been far faster than Firefox (I believe) since inception. It
remained my browser of choice until Firebug tipped me over: I gained much from
being able to run hundreds of tabs simultaneously. I'm thrilled with the news.

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fdb
A warning before switching to the latest nightlies
(<http://nightly.webkit.org/>): Gmail doesn't seem to be supported. Spoofing
the user agent to pretend to be Safari 2.0.4 does load the page, but none of
the links work.

~~~
pius
Interesting, I'm not running into that problem.

------
pius
Now who wants to learn Objective-C with me and port some of Flock's sweet Web
2.0 features over to Safari/Webkit? ;)

~~~
systems
Objective-C? I thought webkit was Qt/C++ like everything Kde!

~~~
tolmasky
WebKit proper is Objective-C. WebCore and JavaScriptCore (which sit below
WebKit) are both C++ (technically portions are Objective-C++ I guess).

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kinkydarkbird
Safari is not the only browser to use webkit.

~~~
rms
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#KHTML_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#KHTML_and_WebKit-
based_browsers)

~~~
pius
That article lists Flock as being Webkit-based, but it actually uses Gecko.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Ummm... no it doesn't. Read it again. It lists all browsers, grouped by
implementation.

~~~
pius
Good point.

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mooneater
Rendering of [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/utest-now-open-for-
busi...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/utest-now-open-for-business-get-
paid-to-find-software-bugs/) seems broken on the yesterday's build.

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chicken
i'm diggin the new webkit. much much faster than firefox

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Tichy
I can't believe that rendering speed is an issue with modern CPUs.

~~~
newton_dave
I can't believe any of my software is slow with modern CPUs.

~~~
boucher
I can. It seems developers in general do not consider performance to be a
priority anymore, unfortunately.

~~~
newton_dave
I wasn't aware I need sarcasm tags here. Sorry.

