Run Webkit nightly builds on Windows.
I was really impressed after reading this blog entry from computer world.The author claims that the current Webkit engine is the fastest around and is even faster than Opera. However, his tests were performed on Mac, so I wanted to see if the same tests could be performed on Windows.It turns out that running the latest nightly build of Webkit on Windows, is not difficult at all.You just need to have
- The latest version of Safari for PC.
- Download the latest build of Webkit.
After downloading Webkit and unzipping it, just go and open up a Command Prompt window in the extracted folder.
Then type
E:\WebKit-r30118>run-nightly-webkit.cmd
and it will copy all necessary files to your Safari installation folder which on my machine is C:\Program Files\Safari. Don’t worry it does not muck up your existing Safari installation.
After copying, it will launch Safari with the latest Webkit.
A word of caution. The first time it launched Safari, the browser crashed. But just re-run, run-nightly-webkit.cmd and Safari will open up again, with no problems whatsoever.
You can run a few tests like http://webkit.org/perf/slickspeed/ and compare Webkit to say Opera or Firefox.
I got results like
To summarize the Webkit rendering engine seems to be about 5 times faster than Gecko (Firefox 3 Beta 2) and about 2 times faster than Opera. But having said that Webkit still does not pass the Acid 2 test.This also means Ext 2.0 is one the fastest javascript libraries around!
Sweet! This would be good information for the Webkit folks to have on their website. That would be too easy, I guess.
I just fired up WebKit and it seems to run pretty quick so far!
Thanks for sharing!
Seth Bienek
March 5, 2008 at 1:44 am
[...] be remiss not to mention Swapnonil Mukherjee’s previous post on the subject, which proved to be a pretty good guide to getting a WebKit nightly build running on my [...]
Browsersphere » Blog Archive » Testing WebKit Nightlies on Windows
July 8, 2008 at 9:51 pm
man how do u open a command promp window
jose
October 6, 2008 at 8:38 am
Hey Jose,
You can just double click the run-nightly-webkit.cmd file after you have unzipped Webkit. This should also launch Safari easily.
Neel
October 6, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hi,
Found your blog via a Google search.
I’m running Safari 4 in Windows, and I’m wondering if there’s any way to tell that the Webkit nightlies are indeed running correctly. I don’t get the gold-rimmed Safari icon, nor does Help -> About show anything.
Also regarding your post: the cmd file actually copies the WebKit build to %temp%\WebKitNightly, not your Safari folder. I ran the nightly from a user account that has no write access to the Safari folder, with no problems.
Cheers.
solcroft
April 30, 2009 at 2:38 pm