For those not in the know, the rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari web browser is called WebKit. It is Apple’s version of the KHTML engine used by the Konquerer browser. Since WebKit is also open source, there is an active community behind the project, constantly adding new features to it and refining the existing ones. On the project website, you can download a new nightly build (or two) every day.
Seth Weintraub at our sister site, Computerworld, downloaded the latest nightly build of WebKit recently and was pleasantly surprised by the breakneck performance of Safari’s elder sibling. In his unscientific testing, he found the new and improved browser to be about 2.5 times faster than the latest version of Safari. This means that the next iteration of Safari, on Mac, Windows and the iPhone, will most probably benefit from these improvements as well.
Though I didn’t really experience such drastic gains in speed, I can very distinctly tell that there is significant improvement. So far, the browser has been stable and all the bookmarks that I had in Safari are there in WebKit. Even Inquisitor and Twicetab (the only two plugins that have the honor of being a part of my browsing experience) have survived the transition (read upgrade) and are functioning just fine. For all intents and purposes, I’m just running Safari on steroids (specially after I renamed WebKit to Safari, changed the icon, made it the default browser, gave it pride of place on the Dock and kicked the now outdated Safari off it).
The standard disclaimer that these are test builds and should be treated as such applies, but it is pretty much a formality because as far as I can see, if you can trust Safari, there really isn’t much reason to be suspicious of WebKit. If you want to give it a whirl, head over to the download page to grab the latest build (currently ‘r30109’, released yesterday) and let us know which one you favor — Safari or WebKit — in the comments.
I'm a sucker for final releases. Never really got into the BETA thing. And anyway, it's not like it's going to speed anything up on my dialup connection :D
I am however waiting for those improvements in the Web Inspector. Seem really nice.
Ooh, here come the style police. :-)
WebKit is primarily the name of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rendering engine that backs up Safari. Safari isn't open-source, but WebKit is, and that's why it's been ported to so many platforms and gotten such great enhancements from a smart programming community.
For testing purposes, Apple's engineers built an application that includes the nightly build of the WebKit framework (in two separate versions: one for Mac OS X 10.4, and one for 10.5), as well as a small binary that essentially loads your current version of Safari's program code (all the stuff to draw windows, manage bookmarks, respond to AppleScript, and so on). If Safari is a wrapper around the system's built-in WebKit framework (and it's a bit more than that), this nightly testing application is the same version of Safari wrapped around the current nightly build of WebKit.
The problem is that, for whatever unimaginative reasons, the testing application is also named "WebKit.app", making it easy to ask otherwise-nonsensical questions like "do you prefer Safari or WebKit?" You can't run Safari without WebKit.framework, but in this question, you're referring to WebKit.app. This creates all the same problems that, when Mac OS X first appeared, led a lot of us to call its bundled mail client "Mail.app" to make it clear we were using an application name and not a generic noun. With WebKit.app, it's an application name versus a proper noun ("WebKit.framework"), but it's the same problem.
Since it's probably too late to rename the application something like "Nightly WebKit Browser", adding the awful filename suffix and calling it "WebKit.app" in these contexts would probably be helpful. If we don't, I imagine a lot of people getting confused at some point and never looking further.