Anyone who has followed the support for web standards in today’s popular web browsers knows that the WebKit rendering engine has been at the forefront of that support. Therefore, if you’re a browserphile like me, there’s a good chance you’re interested in testing out the latest and greatest WebKit build so you can see what all the fuss is about. The following is a step-by-step list of things I had to do to get WebKit nightly builds working on my Windows computer.
Download and install the Safari web browser for Windows.
Unzip the contents of the download to a location like C:\Program Files\WebKit Nightlies.
In the contents of the extracted folder, run (either from the command line or by double-clicking on the file) run-nightly-webkit.cmd.
Watch as several necessary files are copied over to your Safari installation directory.
If Safari launches and then crashes, fear not. First try running the run-nightly-webkit.cmd file again. If the crashing persists, work backward through the Windows Nightly Build Archive until you find a working build. Remember, nightly builds are almost always considered dangerous (which is why the Firefox nightlies are called “Minefield“) so it may take some tinkering around before you find a good one. The last good one I found at the time of writing was r34388.
If Safari launches and renders the default start page, you’re in business.
If you want to verify that you’re indeed using the WebKit nightly build you downloaded and not the default Safari rendering engine included with the latest version (3.1.2 at the time of writing), an easy way to check is to head on over to the Acid3 test.
Discontinuous selections allow you to select text from various parts on a page without respect for continuity, all at the same time. Private browsing allows you to put the browser into a state where none of the details of your browsing activities are stored locally on your computer. The bookmark overhaul will allow things like tagging, extended meta data search, synchronization and export into various formats. Furthermore, microformat detection will bring Operator-like functionality to the base browser.
The features shown off in the video look like they will please a lot of Opera users and maybe even a few non-Opera users. Here’s a high-level overview of some of the major features to expect in the first alpha of Kestrel (Opera 9.5), which is set to be released tomorrow:
Speed improvements in the rendering engine
Faster JavaScript engine and an improved HTML table layout algorithm
The option to open pages in other browsers installed on your computer
Of all those features, the one that impressed me most was the full history search. At first, I thought it would be similar to Firefox’s history search, where you basically search through page titles to find content. However, Kestrel takes this a step further by allowing you to search through the textual page content of all the sites in your browser’s history, which seems like it would come in very handy from time-to-time.
The much-anticipated page zoom feature has finally landed in Firefox 3 nightly builds. Firefox 3 will now be able to zoom the entire page, including images as well as text, just like Opera and IE 7.
The page zoom feature request was originally filed in Bugzilla in 1999, but implementation was delayed because it wasn’t considered practical in Gecko 1.8, the current version of Firefox’s HTML rendering engine. Scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 3, the new version of the rendering engine—Gecko 1.9—leverages the open source Cairo vector graphics rendering framework and includes a number of extremely significant improvements to layout and rendering. The page zoom feature was implemented as part of the Gecko overhaul and will now be included in Firefox 3.
Apparently the feature hasn’t been exposed via the browser chrome, yet, but Ars Technica gives an example of how to test it out in the latest build(s).
