The latest build of Webkit "has to be seen to be believed." | Hacker News Reader

The latest build of Webkit "has to be seen to be believed."

techcrunch.com

33 pointspius28 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

Apple competes with open source all the time. Linux is the most obvious example, but most consumer open source software competes with either Apple or MS, and open source is almost always losing. I think what makes this unique is that Firefox is an unusually well designed product that appeals to the average consumer in ways most open source software does not. It also had a head start, and has a huge user base.

In fact, you could argue that unlike usual, Apple is actually winning on technology, and not usability, since perhaps the biggest advantage to firefox is its ability to install plugins.

Opera has been doing that for ages.

AFAIK Opera 9.5 Beta is still faster than these two browsers.

Where did you come up with that assumption? A quick (very unscientific) test of a big web application (over 100 JavaScript and image files) shows you're wrong...

(first column is seconds with empty cache, second column is seconds after cache was filled)

    WebKit     - 15 / 9
    Firefox 3  - 18 / 12
    Safari 3   - 19 / 12
    Opera 9.24 - 20 / 15
    Opera 9.5b - 20 / 19
    Firefox 2  - 21 / 21

Again, these are very rough numbers (I took the best out of about 3 runs) on a pretty slow machine (1.33GHz G4). Perhaps the numbers would be different for simple static pages, but I don't have a good way to time that.

I got my data from here: http://celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed2007.php

Of course, the scientific method means this tests should be reproducible by everyone, and YMMV, but I wasn't talking bullshit, just see the page.

I don't know if I'm reading this right, but think they aren't competing with "open source" in a general sense, since Webkit is open source. Or maybe you meant "with" in the "using" sense: "It's pretty impressive that Apple can compete using open source. I forgot that was possible."

Or maybe you were just talking about Firefox...

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.

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.

Interesting, I'm not running into that problem.

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

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

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

Safari is not the only browser to use webkit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#KHTML_and_...

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

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

Good point.

Rendering of http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/utest-now-open-for-busi... seems broken on the yesterday's build.

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

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

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

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

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

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