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OSX: Tools – Webkit as Web Browser

20th August 2008 By 3 Comments

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.

webkit-1.jpg

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.

webkit-2.jpg

But the most cool feature is the performance analyzer:

webkit-3.jpg

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.

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Filed Under: OSX
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://nerget.com Oliver

    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)

  • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

    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.

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