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

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/09/the-new-safari-is-amazingly-quick-firefox-watch-out/

by pius • 18 years ago

33 28 18 years ago

boucher4• 18 years ago

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.

pg• 18 years ago

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

tolmasky2• 18 years ago

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.

boucher4• 18 years ago

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.

Nicolay772• 18 years ago

Opera has been doing that for ages.

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

anewaccountname• 18 years ago

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...

pius4• 18 years ago

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

systems• 18 years ago

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

tolmasky2• 18 years ago

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

kinkydarkbird• 18 years ago

Safari is not the only browser to use webkit.

rms• 18 years ago

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

pius4• 18 years ago

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

DaniFong• 18 years ago

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.

Tichy• 18 years ago

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

newton_dave2• 18 years ago

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

boucher4• 18 years ago

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

fdb• 18 years ago

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.

pius4• 18 years ago

Interesting, I'm not running into that problem.

mooneater• 18 years ago

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

chicken• 18 years ago

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

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

Related Stories