The Benefits of WebKit
Posted Feb 12th 2008 9:10AM by Lee Givens
Filed under: Member Education, AOL Desktop for Mac
What's WebKit? It's the browser rendering engine (the software that handles the downloading and displaying of web sites) that powers Safari and AOL Desktop for Mac browser. Last year, when the AOL Mac Team had to decide on the browser platform for AOL Desktop for Mac, WebKit was the hands-down favorite. If you're a AOL Desktop for Mac user, whenever Apple updates WebKit, you *magically* get the update in the AOL browser. You will never have an obsolete browser.
We covered WebKit in an earlier post on October 5, 2007.
Check out the article at MacUser - they have found that the upcoming WebKit is up to 250% faster than what everyone's used to today (600% faster than Firefox!).
The top bar (Native) is the upcoming WebKit rendering engine. The shorter the bar, the faster the display of the web site. This is good news to all Mac users and users of the iPhone and iPod Touch, all three use WebKit in the Safari browsers.
If you're the kind of person who thinks this is cool, you can read about the speed improvements at the Surfin' Safari blog, managed by the open source WebKit community (thanks to Oliver for the clarification!).
Note: if you're not familiar with nightly builds, wait until Apple releases the new WebKit in a software update.
Thanks...
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead
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Welcome to the Mac@AOL Blog. My name is Lee Givens and I'm the Product Lead for the Mac products at AOL. You can find the latest information on AOL's software development on the Mac and any cool happenings at AOL. The purpose of the blog is to create a feedback loop so we can hear from our loyal AOL Mac users. Managing a blog is a lot of work, so I enlisted support from the whole team...the Mac team is made up of dedicated Macintosh developers, QA engineers and Product folks.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1. Hmm, actually there are plenty of non-apple posts on the Surfin' Safari blog -- David Smith (the author of the post you reference) is a standalone open source contributor, not an apple employee, certainly it's focused on Apple's implementation, but it's not *just* Apple :D
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Update: Thanks Oliver for the insight. Yes, Apple started with an open source project and extended it with help from the open source community. The Surfin' Safari blog has posts from the whole community, not just Apple.
Posted at 4:04AM on Feb 15th 2008 by Oliver