Mar
28

A better browser

eng ita Apple, Freeware, HowTo, Internet, Utilities Edit Post 5:41 PM

Safari Webkit and some tweak

Webkit, is the render engine used by Safari, and soon it will be adopted by some open-source browsers. Recently it reached an important goal: using the nightly build it scored 100/100 on the Acid3 test . It is the first render engine with a public version to pass all the tests.

This small parentesis is used by me to show how important the standard problem is for the WebKit team. I always use the nightly build of Safari to test and develop my websites, this allow me to make a standardized site, after this step I made some changes to try to make it fully functional with Firefox and IE7. This approach unfortunately doesn't function very well with IE, couse sometimes IE has some illogical behavior. In fact in this moment my site doesn't function with the Microsoft browser for an unknown reason.

The Apple browser is also the fastest to load pages and to execute javascript, but it has the limit to do not have a good plugins structure. In any case I do not use any kind of extension, for me it can generate slowdown and breaks, I prefer quickness and lightness. However there are some tweaks integrated in Safari or WebKit that can be activated without any heavy modification.

  • To force Safari open links in a new TAB (Apple has added an hidden preference to Safari 3.1 that allows you to tell it to stick to one window) You need to execute this command below into Terminal:

    defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

  • To have a Full Page Zoom instead of using the old text zoom API it is possible to activate the new WebKit API. In this way Safari will have a zoom capacity similar to what we can see into the iPhone (Images and flash videos will be scaled with the text).

    defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDebugFullPageZoomPreferenceKey 1

    Once you have execute this command you will be able to use this cool feature, a prerequisite is a recent nightly build.

  • Last useful note: to enable the develop menu type and execute:

    defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDebugFullPageZoomPreferenceKey 1
 

2 Comments to A better browser

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  1. jeby

    ON March 28th, 2008 AT 10:43 pm

    Peccato sia saltata fuori una falla di sicurezza non da ridere:
    http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/27/day-two-of-cansecwest-pwn-to-own—we-have-our-first-official-winner-with-picture

  2. ClimberCat

    ON March 29th, 2008 AT 1:08 am

    Eee già…inquietante anche perché Vista e Ubuntu per ora reggono…
    Anche Safari ha le sue falle (soprattutto per windows), Apple dovrebbe provvedere più tempestivamente. Piuttosto che fare uscire security update ogni settimana, come scrivi tu sul tuo blog, dovrebbe correggere problemi ben più gravi! (vedi phishing problem on Windows).
    Ciò non toglie che l’engine (WebKit), che non ha nulla da spartire a Safari che lo ospita solamente, sia uno dei motori più promettenti del mercato! Trovo ottima l’idea di usarlo in vari dispositivi mobili, e nei prossimi browser di default per Gnome e KDE4.

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