This weekend I had a small pet project I did that gave me a need for a webkit based browser on Linux (Ubuntu 7.04). While I could have used Konqueror I was more interested in a later source base and so downloaded the WebKit r31738 source from http://www.webkit.org. Actually, after a couple simple apt-get install for the development library this source package will compile just fine on a rather stock Ubuntu 7.04 and runs well (Ref: http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk ). The default UI shell for the webkit core is ultra basic but all I need for testing against this rendering engine. One can use webkit as the engine for Epiphany (http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit ) if you want a nicer wrapper.
I was curious to try this new engine (more specifically it's javascript aspect) against my current favorite browser Firefox in the form of Firefox 3 Beta 5 (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html ). A tried both the Dromaeo test suite (still in early release, review notes at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Dromaeo ) and Sunspider from: http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html. My platform is rather paltry Athlon 64 3200+ and 2 gigs of memory running the afore mentioned Ubuntu 7.04.
Firefox 3 Beta 5:
http://dromaeo.com/?id=5552 (3282.80ms)
http://dromaeo.com/?id=5560 (3287.60ms)
SunSpider: 6794.0ms
WebKit
http://dromaeo.com/?id=5556 (3260.60ms)
http://dromaeo.com/?id=5563 (3225.40ms)
SunSpider: 5794.8ms
In the Dromaeo test there is for all practical purposes no difference between the two javascript engines. Sunspider showed a 1.17 factor favor toward the Webkit engine. There has been a lot of recent new traffic over acid3 testing and other performance metrics (http://ajaxian.com/archives/where-is-firefox-on-acid-3-here ). The Firefox ecosystem around its amazing set of add-ones (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ ) is without question a key factor for me. The Mozilla foundations strong effort on standards, highly open and extensible platform win over a few percentage points from a Javascript benchmark. The acid3's focus on DOM scripting is important to me and so I would like to see that arrive in the Gecko engine though some of the comments of Mike Shaver (http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/03/27/the-missed-opportunity-of-acid-3/ ) and Rob Sayre (http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-worthless/ ) regarding this do make sense to me.
I'm a loyal Firefox user and nothing I have seen from the Webkit camp has yet to give me any pause, though I am glad they are there. We need competition and pressure to drive development forward. It's always good to compare and I am still in a situation where as a developer I need to have various engines around for testing. I also played around with the new Next-Generation Java Plug-in (https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/ ) and was very impressed with it as well. Especially the easy javascript to applet communication the new plugin delivers.
take care
Doug
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