OSX: Tools - Webkit as Web Browser
20 August, 2008 by Greg Ferro Print Posting
My preferred browser on OS X is to use Web Kit. Lets have a quick overview and some logic.
What is WebKit ?
WebKit is the open source rendering engine and web browser that is used by the Safari Web Browser. The project is sponsored / supported by Apple is some way.
From the home page”
“WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. ”
Why use Web Kit
S-P-E-E-D
I can’t imagine what they do, but WebKit is way faster, you can visibly notice the performance. I know that it doesn’t download faster than Firefox, but it really feels like the apply magic to make it go faster.
Javascript
The Javascript interpreter run appreciably faster than the Firefox interpreter. I find this really useful when running ASDM for Cisco firewalls as the response is much quicker than IE or Firefox.
Website performance and Inspection Tools
Firefox has the brilliant Web Developers addon, but Webkit has it builtin. Simply right click and you have an element inspector.
But the most cool feature is the performance analyzer:
I find this useful to give me a rough guide to performance on Web sites before I go and dig the ore serious tools for performance analysis.
Where it isn’t so great
Some things don’t work so well. Webkit is fully ACID2 compliant, and doesn’t support some legacy HTML. Certain Cisco management servers don’t work so well e.g. ACS 4.1 really messes up and certain corporate CMS / help desk / internalware systems also have some proprietary glue in there that can cause WebKit to work poorly.
Conclusion
But, hey, it’s the NEXT version of Safari and a few bugs is a reaonable price to pay for getting a web browser that seems to perform magic to improve performance. Since I also use Camino, Shiira and Firefox for web browsing I don’t have a problem with the things that don’t work.
I often use WebKit for configuration work, and keep Firefox for more business functions. This means that Firefox is a bit more stable, and I get the performance where I need it.
Apple doesn’t fund “WebKit” in the separate organisation sense — WebKit was a system framework developed by Apple, and the vast majority of development work not related to a specific port (such as qt or gtk) is made directly by apple engineers, this includes the majority of developer features, and basically all of the core layout and rendering (css, the new html5 database apis, etc, etc)
WebKit is Apple’s reworking of the KHTML library from KDE thus my comment “The project is sponsored / supported by Apple is some way. ” This implies a range of possible mechanisms for Apple to support the project, without implication.
I didn’t think the details were particularly relevant so left it open.
[...] on firewalls or load balancer it can be a useful tool to get visibility. Step 1 - Open Safari (I recommend you use Webkit) and then open the Preferences Menu, Choose Advanced and tick the “Show Develop Menu in the [...]