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

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

#22
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

You make it seem like it's open source thanks to their own good will - it's based on KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, which was LGPLed.

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

#23
post #3
post #2

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.

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

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...

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

#25
post #22
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You make it seem like it's open source thanks to their own good will - it's based on KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, which was LGPLed.

Yes, it started as KHTML, but Apple has taken it to a new level.

The KHTML and WebKit guys have had their differences in the past, but I believe KHTML is trying to merge all of the WebKit improvements back into KHTML, hopefully eventually unforking the two:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unf...

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

#26
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Opera has been doing that for ages. AFAIK Opera 9.5 Beta is still faster than these two browsers.

Where did you come up with that assumption? A quick (very unscientific) test of a big web application (over 100 JavaScript and image files) shows you're wrong...

(first column is seconds with empty cache, second column is seconds after cache was filled)

    WebKit     - 15 / 9
    Firefox 3  - 18 / 12
    Safari 3   - 19 / 12
    Opera 9.24 - 20 / 15
    Opera 9.5b - 20 / 19
    Firefox 2  - 21 / 21
Again, these are very rough numbers (I took the best out of about 3 runs) on a pretty slow machine (1.33GHz G4). Perhaps the numbers would be different for simple static pages, but I don't have a good way to time that.

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

#27
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it seem like it's open source thanks to their own good will - it's based on KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, which was LGPLed.

Yes, it started as KHTML, but Apple has taken it to a new level. The KHTML and WebKit guys have had their differences in the past, but I believe KHTML is trying to merge all of the WebKit improvements back into KHTML, hopefully eventually unforking the two: http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unf...

It's also worth noting that Apple could have used a different engine, or started from scratch.

Similarly, they could have chosen not to open source the darwin kernel, and they could have based it on something other than BSD.

The point was that Apple seems to know when to choose open source technology and leverage it, and when to start from scratch and build their own proprietary system.

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

#28
post #14

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

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

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

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

#29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I wasn't aware I need sarcasm tags here. Sorry.

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

#30
post #3
post #2

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.

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

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