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WOFF is in Chromium's webkit but seemingly not mainline webkit.

Yeah, I know because Apple never gives anything back to the open source community at all!

To be fair, "developed by Apple" in "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems." in the CUPS home page means "Apple hired the guy who created CUPS, and it's now an Apple project", not "Apple were the original developers of CUPS".

Yeah, I know because Apple never gives anything back to the open source community at all!

If there was a fairy that allowed me to abolish Apple with the cost of getting rid of these products, I'd hit it.

We should really develop a new standard printing system. Hopefully the google cloud printing one will turn out to bewarthwhile. As for webkit - I love Chrome, but I could live with the new firefox.

Yeah, I know because Apple never gives anything back to the open source community at all!

JavaScript and what-have-you benchmarks....

Only the latest "Release" versions of browsers entered my tests, and while I did want to test IE8 I didnt want to mess with the registry in order to disable its long running script detection, which was causing a blocking modal popup that prevented accurate performance measurements (and we all know its scripting performance is no better than FireFox anyways.)
Test system:

AMD Phenom II x6 1055T (Cool'n'Quiet and Turbo disabled)
Win7/64 Home Premium


V8 Benchmark (higher is better)

5752 - Chrome 5.0.375.86 - July 3rd, 2010.
4789 - Opera 10.6 (3445) - July 3rd, 2010.
3239 - Safari 5.0 (7533.16) - July 3rd, 2010.
614 - Firefox 3.6.6 - July 3rd, 2010.

SunSpider Benchmark (lower is better)

252.6ms - Opera 10.6 (3445) - July 3rd, 2010.
277.2ms - Chrome 5.0.375.86 - July 3rd, 2010.
314.8ms - Safari 5.0 (7533.16) - July 3rd, 2010.
675.6ms - Firefox 3.6.6 - July 3rd, 2010.

Dromaeo JavaScript (higher is better)

428.20runs/s - Opera 10.6 (3445) - July 3rd, 2010.
417.02runs/s - Chrome 5.0.375.86 - July 3rd, 2010.
143.36runs/s - Safari 5.0 (7533.16) - July 3rd, 2010.
104.61runs/s - Firefox 3.6.6 - July 3rd, 2010.


So Google Chrome is doing really well on Google's Benchmark, while Opera is doing a bit better everywhere else. Its Chrome vs Opera on the javascript performance front now, with the others distinctively out of the race in at least one of the benchmarks.

http://webkit.org/

Recently, Google announced Android 2.2, the next version of their Linux-based mobile operating system targeted at phones and PDAs, at Google I/O 2010. Developers praised the update, calling it and its features a welcome addition to the platform.

Android 2.2 will bring the phone operating system closer to parity with its competitors. With 2.2r4 out now and a projected final release date of Summer '10, Android 2.2 is coming fast.

But stepping back from all of the commotion, what exactly is Google offering with this update? What are these new features and who will benefit from them? There are plenty of questions about Android 2.2and here are the answers.

Five Alive

Probably the most important update for Android for its end-users is HTML5. This changes very little about the platform itself, but it shows that Google is investing in the technology. It also means that users will have a seamless Web experience.

These two things are important for the future success of Android as a viable mobile platform, though Google's implementation might prove problematic.

On live devices, users will have to install Android 2.2 in its entirety to gain HTML5 support. An entire operating system upgrade for a browser? Get real and update the browser on its owndon't make your users go through the trouble of updating and installing a fundamental update just for some HTML5 support, Google. If this is how you run your phone operating system, I'd hate to see what you expect of Chrome OS users.

And there's also the fact that HTML5 is not novel. Every other industry player has already been including HTML5 support; Apple has long been a proponent of this, including HTML5 support in the developmental Webkit as well Safari since 2007. You're welcome to the party, Google, but don't announce it like you're the one throwing it. You can make catchup, but it's still catchup.

Flash Forward

Oh, Flash. Google and Adobe are performing a very calculated industry sixty-nine because both Apple and Google want the mobile-cum-portable market and Adobe wants the video portion of both.

Apple is pushing the open HTML5 standard; Adobe is pissed at Apple. Google, with the old the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic, sees an opportunity and hooks up with Adobe. Sadly, revenge sex only seems clever at first.

The reality is that HTML5, being open and supported by hundreds of companies and standard bodies, will win in the end. Google and Adobe will look like assholes having lapped at such a bloated, poorly-coded, closed video platform that everyone else will zoom past using their browsers sans crashy plugin.

Who wins in the end? The entire industry, sharing in the HTML5 platform, and users, whose browsers don't crash or chew up excess cycles and memory. Sadly, though, not Android users, who are unwitting Adobe consumers.

Hotspotting et al

Android will also support hotspotting, or wifi sharing funneled into its 3G or 4G network, of up to eight other devices. I'm not sure if you've done any serious work on 3G yet, but it's slow.

The prospect of using one 3G account to support other Internet-hungry devices is like expecting a pygmy to carry weightlifters: backbreaking at best and otherwise i

Apple likes everyone to believe they built it from the bottom up.

Bullshit. Apple runs the site for the open source project. It's derivation from KHTML is in the very first paragraph of the page.
http://webkit.org/

Also on Apple's corporate description of Webkit. Again, very first paragraph.
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/internet/webkit.html

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

From the WebKit site itself:

"Apple employees have contributed the majority of work on WebKit since it became an independent project. Apple uses WebKit for Safari on Mac OS X, iPhone and Windows; on the former two it is also a system framework and used by many other applications. Apple's contribution has included extensive work on standards compliance, Web compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and development of major new features."

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/Companies%20and%20Organizations%20that%20have%20contributed%20to%20WebKit

Chrome and Safari should always be fairly close in performance, they both use the same code under the hood.

Just the lack of support for window.onerror makes me think that they don't take web developers seriously.
With Acid3 they rushed to make the changes so they claimed to pass it, but implementing correctly features that are used everyday?, no way man, that ain't cool

While its true that Apple were the ones that originally started turning the wheels for WebKit, its also true that was well before the days of HTML5.

Currently with the creation of Chrome, I'd safely say there are more Google Committers to the WebKit then what Apple has now.

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team

I'd say the in spirit of things what Apple's is doing is a little Microsofty. Considering that Nokia, Microsoft (yes Microsoft) and naturally Google contribute to the WebKit.

Apple's website promotes web compliant solutions with the use of HTML5 but blocks all other browsers inferring that Safari is the only compliant solution.

Kind of petty considering they are drinking from the same stream as Google but I've come to expect this sort of crap when it comes to Apple, they are such a "microsoft-wannabe" when they want too ... and If they just quit the shit and got on with things I probably would hold them in a higher regard.

Yeah, like it's possible to do. But just think about it - WebKit was forked from KHTML is 1998. Were you using a web browser in 1998?

I was using Mosaic on Linux back when you had to have Motif and build it yourself.

It should be ENTIRELY possible to figure out where the code came from in WebKit. But keep in mind that it first started with KHTML and further has received significant contributions from a variety of sources. Apple claims only to have done the "majority" of work since the fork. The WebKit Wiki in fact credits other developers for many major features.

Recently, Google announced Android 2.2, the next version of their Linux-based mobile operating system targeted at phones and PDAs, at Google I/O 2010. Developers praised the update, calling it and its features a welcome addition to the platform.

Android 2.2 will bring the phone operating system closer to parity with its competitors. With 2.2r4 out now and a projected final release date of Summer '10, Android 2.2 is coming fast.

But stepping back from all of the commotion, what exactly is Google offering with this update? What are these new features and who will benefit from them? There are plenty of questions about Android 2.2and here are the answers.

Five Alive

Probably the most important update for Android for its end-users is HTML5. This changes very little about the platform itself, but it shows that Google is investing in the technology. It also means that users will have a seamless Web experience.

These two things are important for the future success of Android as a viable mobile platform, though Google's implementation might prove problematic.

On live devices, users will have to install Android 2.2 in its entirety to gain HTML5 support. An entire operating system upgrade for a browser? Get real and update the browser on its owndon't make your users go through the trouble of updating and installing a fundamental update just for some HTML5 support, Google. If this is how you run your phone operating system, I'd hate to see what you expect of Chrome OS users.

And there's also the fact that HTML5 is not novel. Every other industry player has already been including HTML5 support; Apple has long been a proponent of this, including HTML5 support in the developmental Webkit as well Safari since 2007. You're welcome to the party, Google, but don't announce it like you're the one throwing it. You can make catchup, but it's still catchup.

Flash Forward

Oh, Flash. Google and Adobe are performing a very calculated industry sixty-nine because both Apple and Google want the mobile-cum-portable market and Adobe wants the video portion of both.

Apple is pushing the open HTML5 standard; Adobe is pissed at Apple. Google, with the old the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic, sees an opportunity and hooks up with Adobe. Sadly, revenge sex only seems clever at first.

The reality is that HTML5, being open and supported by hundreds of companies and standard bodies, will win in the end. Google and Adobe will look like assholes having lapped at such a bloated, poorly-coded, closed video platform that everyone else will zoom past using their browsers sans crashy plugin.

Who wins in the end? The entire industry, sharing in the HTML5 platform, and users, whose browsers don't crash or chew up excess cycles and memory. Sadly, though, not Android users, who are unwitting Adobe consumers.

Hotspotting et al

Android will also support hotspotting, or wifi sharing funneled into its 3G or 4G network, of up to eight other devices. I'm not sure if you've done any serious work on 3G yet, but it's slow.

The prospect of using one 3G account to support other Internet-hungry devices is like expecting a pygmy to carry weightlifters: backbreaking at best and otherwise i

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

Recently, Google announced Android 2.2, the next version of their Linux-based mobile operating system targeted at phones and PDAs, at Google I/O 2010. Developers praised the update, calling it and its features a welcome addition to the platform.

Android 2.2 will bring the phone operating system closer to parity with its competitors. With 2.2r4 out now and a projected final release date of Summer '10, Android 2.2 is coming fast.

But stepping back from all of the commotion, what exactly is Google offering with this update? What are these new features and who will benefit from them? There are plenty of questions about Android 2.2and here are the answers.

Five Alive

Probably the most important update for Android for its end-users is HTML5. This changes very little about the platform itself, but it shows that Google is investing in the technology. It also means that users will have a seamless Web experience.

These two things are important for the future success of Android as a viable mobile platform, though Google's implementation might prove problematic.

On live devices, users will have to install Android 2.2 in its entirety to gain HTML5 support. An entire operating system upgrade for a browser? Get real and update the browser on its owndon't make your users go through the trouble of updating and installing a fundamental update just for some HTML5 support, Google. If this is how you run your phone operating system, I'd hate to see what you expect of Chrome OS users.

And there's also the fact that HTML5 is not novel. Every other industry player has already been including HTML5 support; Apple has long been a proponent of this, including HTML5 support in the developmental Webkit as well Safari since 2007. You're welcome to the party, Google, but don't announce it like you're the one throwing it. You can make catchup, but it's still catchup.

Flash Forward

Oh, Flash. Google and Adobe are performing a very calculated industry sixty-nine because both Apple and Google want the mobile-cum-portable market and Adobe wants the video portion of both.

Apple is pushing the open HTML5 standard; Adobe is pissed at Apple. Google, with the old the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic, sees an opportunity and hooks up with Adobe. Sadly, revenge sex only seems clever at first.

The reality is that HTML5, being open and supported by hundreds of companies and standard bodies, will win in the end. Google and Adobe will look like assholes having lapped at such a bloated, poorly-coded, closed video platform that everyone else will zoom past using their browsers sans crashy plugin.

Who wins in the end? The entire industry, sharing in the HTML5 platform, and users, whose browsers don't crash or chew up excess cycles and memory. Sadly, though, not Android users, who are unwitting Adobe consumers.

Hotspotting et al

Android will also support hotspotting, or wifi sharing funneled into its 3G or 4G network, of up to eight other devices. I'm not sure if you've done any serious work on 3G yet, but it's slow.

The prospect of using one 3G account to support other Internet-hungry devices is like expecting a pygmy to carry weightlifters: backbreaking at best and otherwise i

http://bit.ly/d0Glam:

I am often away from my computer for weeks at a time, digging at archaeology sites, before I return to clean, sort, and catalog my finds. And every time I launch my browser of choice, I have to sit through yet another Firefox update.

Sometime's it's a major update, like Firefox 3.6 for instance, but more often than nottoo oftenit's some stupid little tertiary update that requires Firefox to download, quit, root around on the hard drive, and restart with a whole damn brand-new binary. Why?!

Just once I'd like to sit down, boot up, and get to work instead of wading through this slow, irritating process that the Mozilla developers subject me to.

I've become envious of my friends who run Safari, Apple's home-grown browser, which is updated less frequently. If they want more frequent updates, they download and install WebKit, but can otherwise continue on day after day without interruption in Safari.

I like this model, as it lets busy people like me get more work done, so I am thinking of purchasing a Mac. Really, anything to get me away from the time-wasting wreck of a browser that Firefox has become is a good idea.

The Firefox model crashes and burns its users. Literally, too, when you think about all of its other addling bugs and design flaws that crash the browser and burn countless CPU cycles.

So until I can see the web in a whole new way with Safari on a new Mac, it'll be another day, another Firefox update.

Thanks a lot for nothing, Mozilla.

Firstly, it's not my choice.

Wait, is it "not your choice" or is your policy to only fix "absolute brokens" (whatever those are)?

Secondly, I do not understand what all these "performance" comments are lately. I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine. What are you doing, playing networked quake???

No, I'm not playing games, I'm writing large-scale online service applications. You know, the same sort of Javascript-powered applications that Google produces (Maps, Gmail, Docs, etc).

Here's an example. This is a Javascript benchmark for several recent browsers. You can see that IE8 is an order of magnitude slower than everything else:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/SunSpider/Default.html

Also notice that IE9 is there, it's faster than Firefox 3.7. Notice also what's missing from that graph: IE6 and IE7. If you look at that graph and think that IE8 is pretty far behind, take a look at this:

http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/

The first graph on that page shows IE7. While IE8 on that graph is 2x slower than the next slowest, IE7 is nearly 4x slower than IE8. IE7 is more than 10x slower than the fastest browser in that graph.

And I'm just talking about IE7 here. IE7 was an improvement over IE6, so you can imagine where IE6 would place there. In fact, IE6 is both so old and so bad that I'm having a hard time even finding benchmarks which include it.

But hey, since you clearly have access to IE6, go ahead and take the test yourself:

http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

Keep in mind that lower is better because it's a measure of time, and that Microsoft is reporting a score for Opera 10.5 at about 300ms. I just ran the test here on my POS laptop with Opera 10.5 with 12 other tabs open, and it completed the test in 1126ms. You go ahead and run that test with IE6 and, assuming it's even able to finish it, then maybe you'll understand what all this "performance" talk is about.

I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine.

No, I disagree, I think that you haven't seen a browser which had good performance on a modern machine, and you don't even realize there's an alternative to the only thing you know.

Right, because Apple has such a bad track record with this kind of stuff.

How again is Apple more "evil" than Microsoft?

Almost all the the comments here about what Apple will or won't do are complete uninformed bullshit. None of us has a clue what Apple will or won't do with ARM.

Perhaps this is a defensive move to keep Google or someone else from acquiring ARM and shutting Apple out? That's just as valid a hypothesis as any here...

Once web technologies evolve the web will be a foundation for apps, music, and video.... ...It wouldn't be a problem if Apple developed an open technology to replace Flash.

You mean like WebKit?

Yes it is.

http://webkit.org/

Completely agreed, especially on actually compiling to bytecode. Fortunately we're already getting past even that, in some browsers at least: http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/

I would love it if we could tear out Javascript and replace it with something better designed and better performing in every major browser. Unfortunately we're stuck with it for the near future. In 7-10 years, maybe all browsers will be running Python. That would be pretty sweet in my book at least. =)

man, I really hate apple, they are soooooo closed..
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
http://webkit.org/

erm, I hate to ask but what other browser are you referring to?

Safari's window code may be proprietary but it uses Webkit as it's rendering engine, which to my knowledge is not only open source but the most standard compliant at the moment. http://webkit.org/

Chrome also uses Webkit and Chromium is the open source version of it. http://code.google.com/chromium/

Gecko is the open source renderer for Firefox and most of the other browsers that appear on a website's stats.

Opera is the only proprietary browser other than IE and it's pushing standards just as much as Gecko and Webkit.

am I missing something?

Safari was the first to fully pass Acid3.

Actually, I refuse to believe Jobs is that short-sighted or stupid. That hoopla over web apps was Jobs telling you what you had while he had the team feverishly working on the SDK in the background.

He couldn't say nothing. And he couldn't say it was coming later, because if he did, no one would have touched the iPhone for the first year.

There was more to it than that. I think there was a debate between a native SDK and using a web-based SDK (like what Palm did with WebOS). Apple was clearly working on both tracks, but WebKit was just not ready fast enough. There was evidence of this.

One of the complaints about the web SDK approach was the lack of local storage for offline use. A SQL interface had been proposed for HTML5, but hadn't been implemented by anyone yet. Apple announced the iPhone native SDK on Oct 17. That weekend (on Oct 19th), quietly on the WebKit Blog, HTML5 client-side SQL storage was quietly checked in. Coincidence? No way.

The other thing is for certain, the iPhone native SDK was not ready in time for iPhone 1.0. The jailbreakers had to deal with regular app breakage due to Apple changing APIs. Apple wasn't screwing with the jailbreakers, they were refining the SDK. That is much easier to do if you only have a dozen in-house applications to work on. Once it was declared final for iPhone 2.0, Apple had to support it fully. There have been few changes to the public API since, though there were some for iPhone 3.0.

Oddly enough, I think the people who wish the iPhone to be more open would have been happier if the webSDK approach had won out. It would have made it easy for other companies to support iPhone apps by including a WebKit-based browser.

And WebKit, thanks to which we have Chrome, and Darwin. And a whole bunch of other stuff

First of all, the engine of Safari is open source, portable. See it at http://webkit.org/ . It is so platform neutral that Gnome camp, KDE Camp (Qt 4) and Apple's toughest smart phone competitor (Nokia) uses it.

Do you see anything like mshtml.org ? Please tell me if you see one. Even Apple is not a convicted monopoly, by offering their Webkit openly, for free to dozens (including competitors) and enabling even MS IE to use it, if they wish, the situation changes instantly.

Stop comparing Apple Safari to Windows IE, they are really, really irrelevant. BTW; where is MS IE 8 for OS X? For what exact reason it is not shipped? Because MS wants to "punish" OS X users for not choosing Windows. Same can be said about Linux/BSD. EU and US Judicial system is dealing with a company like that. A total spoiled 6 year old rich kid.

Chromes extensions install without you having to restart the browser. if they crash, they crash only the extension, and they are also very easy to make (just javascript). I find the extension model much better than firefox's.

Unfortunately I can't stand webkit's middle click behaviour years of middle clicking on everything are not easily forgotten, so i'm sticking with firefox.

I've never been too happy with Firefox's middle-click behavior, though. It seems to be mapped to a bunch of one-click operations that have apparently nothing to do with each other...

Middle click in window: paste clipboard buffer to URL bar and go
Middle click on link: open link in new tab (this one is actually useful)
Middle click on tab: close the tab

So if you mistakenly middle-click while you're not over a link you get sent to some random place - quite possibly the badly-behaved DNS server's ad page... It all seems very arbitrary, like they just randomly mapped out a bunch of functions to the middle button.

Chromes extensions install without you having to restart the browser. if they crash, they crash only the extension, and they are also very easy to make (just javascript). I find the extension model much better than firefox's.

Unfortunately I can't stand webkit's middle click behaviour years of middle clicking on everything are not easily forgotten, so i'm sticking with firefox.

How do you hide or move a DOM object in real time with css?

Right now? You don't. In the future? Maybe CSS animation (already implemented in WebKit).

WTF? Most companies don't release nightly builds of their software.

Not when it comes to web browsers. You can get nightlies from every single other major browser, except for IE.

• Firefox
• Safari (WebKit)
• Chrome (Chromium)
• Opera (ok weeklies, but still)

"What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine."

It really does. I've been working on an interactive touchscreen kiosk for work, and decided to go the JS route in the browser since it's what I know. As such I wanted to know the relative JS performance of the various browsers out there. I used the SunSpider benchmark to test them. Here were the results (smaller numbers are better):

Safari 4.04 (482)
Chrome 4.0b (518)
FF 3.5 (1502)
IE8 (7773)

Two things surprised me here. One is that Chrome and Safari are 3x faster than FF. I was going to use FF for my kiosk until I saw this. The other is the abysmal performance of IE. When you are 15x slower than two of your rivals that is just horrible. As it is I used Chrome for my project and couldn't be happier.

Where do you think WebKit from Apple comes from? Oh yes... KDE's svn servers >.
No, they don't, webkit's svn repository is at http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk.

Now go whois that domain, and tell me who owns it?

The point is that while Apple, Qt, Google etc will certainly work together, the code level I care about and with which I am familiar with when it comes to community, reporting, etc is Qt, not Apple. Apple may or may not merge back what Qt does to fix WebKit from KDE's pov, but as Apple has been known to make strange usability decisions, I'd rather not bet onto it.
No, the point is, you're trying to slag off apple saying that they don't give back the source code in any usable form, and yet, there, sat right in front of you is apple's svn server containing the authoritative source for WebKit.

At a guess, you'll be complaining that their bug database isn't open yet... which... yep, you guessed it, it *is*.
https://bugs.webkit.org/query.cgi?format=specific&product=WebKit

People keep spreading FUD about how much of a bad citizen apple is being with WebKit, and yet, there are at least two companies (nokia and google) and a large open source project (Qt) interacting with them quite happily.

Where do you think WebKit from Apple comes from? Oh yes... KDE's svn servers >.
No, they don't, webkit's svn repository is at http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk.

Now go whois that domain, and tell me who owns it?

The point is that while Apple, Qt, Google etc will certainly work together, the code level I care about and with which I am familiar with when it comes to community, reporting, etc is Qt, not Apple. Apple may or may not merge back what Qt does to fix WebKit from KDE's pov, but as Apple has been known to make strange usability decisions, I'd rather not bet onto it.
No, the point is, you're trying to slag off apple saying that they don't give back the source code in any usable form, and yet, there, sat right in front of you is apple's svn server containing the authoritative source for WebKit.

At a guess, you'll be complaining that their bug database isn't open yet... which... yep, you guessed it, it *is*.
https://bugs.webkit.org/query.cgi?format=specific&product=WebKit

People keep spreading FUD about how much of a bad citizen apple is being with WebKit, and yet, there are at least two companies (nokia and google) and a large open source project (Qt) interacting with them quite happily.

Eolas promised not to sue non-profit companies such as Firefox on the basis of this patent. My question is, if they are capable of suing Apple and Google, both of whom have spent considerable amounts of money developing Webkit and providing the source code of their work available for all for free, then what stops Eolas from suing Firefox? Will we let patent litigation take us into the dark ages of the Internet?

Webkit is in a state of flux - it's not a constant at the moment.

There are a number of versions of the Webkit library in use - Safari 3 uses one version, Safari 4 another one. Chrome uses (I'm guessing) yet another one and then there's the latest Webkit nightly builds - http://webkit.org/

Shiira is WebKit based, which means it is the same basis as Safari and Chrome. If Shiira is faster than Safari, it is probably using a more recent WebKit build than the currently shipping Safari. You can also get Safari with leading-edge daily builds of WebKit from http://webkit.org/. When WebKit introduced the Squirrelfish and then Squirrelfish Extreme Javascript engines, they were available in the WebKit daily builds first.

If nothing else, WebKit has really pushed standards compliance and speed.

If you want browser control over animations, then take a look at WebKit's CSS Animation proposal. Instead of driving animations with opaque Javascript you can specify them declaratively in CSS, and as a side effect the browser gains control over the implementation.

...it's now used by companies like Nokia and Adobe...

...and Google and Palm, and...

Apple has, and does, use GPL'd code and complies with the terms of the license.

Take, for example, WebKit, which is a fork of KHTML. It's now released as LGPL:
http://webkit.org/coding/lgpl-license.html

This code powers the browser that Apple ship with Mac OS X, Safari - which is arguably one of the most important pieces of code in the whole OS.

As a result of it's quality, speed and standards adherence, it's now used by companies like Nokia and Adobe...

Apple lawyer will simply instruct judge(s) to type http://www.webkit.org/ and remind them it is open source, even used by their most die-hard competitors in their products. We speak about 100M+ Nokia phones coming with Webkit based browser here.

And the judge would then correctly state "webkit is not a web browser, Safari is," and rule against apple.

Funny thing is, even if Apple is ruled as monopolist, evil, servant of satan in future, nothing happens to Webkit.

Apple lawyer will simply instruct judge(s) to type http://www.webkit.org/ and remind them it is open source, even used by their most die-hard competitors in their products. We speak about 100M+ Nokia phones coming with Webkit based browser here.

So, morons are really morons comparing Safari to IE. Oh BTW, dying to have Safari under Linux/BSD? Install "Arora", it is the closest thing to Safari, Qt 4 based (as it comes with Webkit).

As you mention Gnome, they have recently chosen Webkit to be included as help browser since it fits perfectly to that environment too. Apple didn't choose KHTML and transformed it to Webkit for "fashion" reasons, it is also a guarantee for future.

you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)

HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.

Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
  - CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/
  - CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/
  - CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
  - CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/
  - video tag, already in use by dailymotion: http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/

I use the nightly builds of WebKit and it's been an excellent browser for me for the past few years.

So actually a multimedia player will be pretty easy to implement, child play compared to a native application doing the same thing on Linux.
Sure it won't help much to watch a DVD, but netbooks don't have dvd players anyhow. The trend is to all of your data online. Even Netflix is moving toward streaming rather than physical media, once DRM dies with the MPAA I'm sure they'll adopt HTML 5 instead of Silverlight.

you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)

HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.

Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
  - CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/
  - CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/
  - CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
  - CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/
  - video tag, already in use by dailymotion: http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/

I use the nightly builds of WebKit and it's been an excellent browser for me for the past few years.

So actually a multimedia player will be pretty easy to implement, child play compared to a native application doing the same thing on Linux.
Sure it won't help much to watch a DVD, but netbooks don't have dvd players anyhow. The trend is to all of your data online. Even Netflix is moving toward streaming rather than physical media, once DRM dies with the MPAA I'm sure they'll adopt HTML 5 instead of Silverlight.

you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)

HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.

Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
  - CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/
  - CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/
  - CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
  - CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/
  - video tag, already in use by dailymotion: http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/

I use the nightly builds of WebKit and it's been an excellent browser for me for the past few years.

So actually a multimedia player will be pretty easy to implement, child play compared to a native application doing the same thing on Linux.
Sure it won't help much to watch a DVD, but netbooks don't have dvd players anyhow. The trend is to all of your data online. Even Netflix is moving toward streaming rather than physical media, once DRM dies with the MPAA I'm sure they'll adopt HTML 5 instead of Silverlight.

you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)

HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.

Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
  - CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/
  - CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/
  - CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
  - CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/
  - video tag, already in use by dailymotion: http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/

I use the nightly builds of WebKit and it's been an excellent browser for me for the past few years.

So actually a multimedia player will be pretty easy to implement, child play compared to a native application doing the same thing on Linux.
Sure it won't help much to watch a DVD, but netbooks don't have dvd players anyhow. The trend is to all of your data online. Even Netflix is moving toward streaming rather than physical media, once DRM dies with the MPAA I'm sure they'll adopt HTML 5 instead of Silverlight.

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!