FROM Surfin’ Safari:
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.
It is surprisingly very easy to get the latest WebKit build running on your computer. All you have to do is to download and install the latest nightly build. A new icon will be made available, as well as the debug tool Drosera.
Once WebKit is installed, it can be launched just like Safari. Its icon even looks similar to Safari’s, except that the compass has a golden lining instead of the silver one that ornates Safari’s. There is a noticeable improvement in speed, especially with pages that have a lot of JavaScript — this is obvious with pages that contain “widgets” such as Google Ads. But, the selling point of using WebKit is that you will be running the best [1] web rendering engine under the hood — WebKit runs within Safari, to make it simpler.
I haven’t tried the Windows build of WebKit, but a nightly build for that OS is also available. So, it may turn out to be just as easy to install. Give it a try and let me know.
[1] This seems to be a given, as there are no flames coming from the Firefox camp. Incidentally, Firefox 2 does not even pass the Acid2 test, and it looks like Firefox 3 will not pass Acid3 due to the rather outdated underlying Gecko engine.
Eddy.
I don’t know if this means Safari will get better support for less common standards, especially SVG (hopefully lots of svg animation fun) and maybe mathml too, in that area, Gecko is superior.
It seems like the WebKit team is working on improving performance too, I know Safari already is fast, but it could get better, sometimes it freezes while loading several pages simultaneously
When will we see it in a Safari release?
@stelt: Probably in the next update.
@emil: A recent post on Surfin’ Safari explains how the team has improved the performance of rendering pages that contain elements generated from JavaScript. So, they are taking performance seriously.
Eddy.
@Eddy – the next update as in 10.5.3? Sweet, soon we’ll have the first stable browser which passes ACID3 :)
The next Safari update rather. But, that’s just me saying.
Eddy.