Download of the day: Webkit nightly builds
Over the last few months, for my day to day web browsing, I’ve really become a fan of Apple’s Safari web browser. It’s standards compliant, better at rendering images than Firefox, and really really screaming fast. Not to mention i LOVE the font rendering in the Windows version! All is not perfect though. I do miss the large community of add-ons that Firefox enjoys, so I keep Firefox around for my Stumbling or Delicious tagging. Most of my browsing though, occurs in Safari, in both Mac and Windows environments.
So when someone told me about the Webkit nightly builds, I couldn’t wait to go download them! Webkit is the open source web browser that Safari is based on. And you can get the newest, most up to date, and bleeding edge version available almost every night. This is the stuff that will go into Safari the next time it gets updated, but you can try it all out right now!
Let me tell you, it is SCREAMING fast, especially on pages that have a lot of javascript (read almost every page on the net). Pages where ads would choke up Firefox or Safari run nice and smoothly on the newest build of Webkit. It’s fantastic!
Installation is easy if you have a Mac. Just download the newest build for Mac and when it opens, drag it to your apps folder like any other app.
For Windows, it’s a bit more difficult. You have to already have Safari for Windows Installed. Once that’s done, you download the build for windows and unzip it to a folder on your computer. Run the file called “run-nightly-webkit.cmd” and it will run a script that will install Webkit along with your Safari installation.
Keep in mind that this is techincally beta software. So it may not work as well as advertised. Though in my personal experience, Webkit has been faster and MORE stable than Safari, hopefully you’ll find it to be the same. If you haven’t tried Safari or Webkit before, I really recommend it. I’ve found it to be nothing but fantastic.
Tags: Firefox, Safari, web browser, Webkit