In a world wide web landscape where the choice of OS, browser, and engine are becoming more and more open and free the importance of standards in the way websites are written and displayed cannot be stressed enough. If a developer has to make hacks and workarounds to ensure his site displays correctly and uniformly on a browser then in my opinion that browser has failed in its single most important job: to correctly parse, render and display the site as it is coded1.
As if I hadn’t made it clear enough already, I like WebKit. A lot! I’ve commented on its speed and reliability, but one reason that I haven’t mentioned so far is standards compliance. The single most important test available today for standards compliance on the web is the Acid3 test, and today the WebKit team have announced that the final hurdle in fully passing the Acid3 test has been overcome.
A little while back I noted that the new V8 JavaScript engine written and employed by Google for their new browser Chrome was to be included in the official WebKit source repository. What I didn’t note there is that I simply see no need for it, since the WebKit project’s own JavaScript engine SquirrelFish is already the fastest engine there is. Well, recently SquirelFish has again had its speed improved. The new SquirrelFish Extreme engine runs more than twice as fast as the previous version. Wow!
This chart shows WebKit’s JavaScript performance in different versions - bigger bars are better.
Well, it seems that I may not have to bother with Chrome at all. Its shared underpinnings with Safari mean that porting the best parts of Chrome to WebKit, and hence Safari, has already begun.
One of the larger innovations of Google Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine, is incredibly fast. The WebKit project has its own new JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish, used in Mobile Safari and the WebKit nightlies. Still, the code base for V8 along with the Skia graphics library are making their way into the main WebKit repository. The Skia graphics library may already be in some of the newest nightly builds.
So, seeing as I can’t test out Google Chrome myself, since its beta is Windows only (for now) I’ve been looking around for any Chrome vs. Safari comparisons. Given they both use Webkit I would expect them to render almost identically. Seems I was wrong, and somehow Google have cockedit up.
That’s what I just shouted, rather loudly, at 2.50am. "The reason?" you might ask. The reason is this beautiful, wonderful, magical little program for Mac OS X: TVShows.
I probably couldn’t do a better three-line introduction than the site provides,1 so here is what they say:
TVShows is a Mac OS X application that automatically downloads your favourite shows. You don’t need anymore to manually download torrent files, TVShows does it for you. Manage your subscriptions and preferences from within the TVShows application, and TVShows takes care of the rest: a background process is automatically launched at a regular interval to check for new episodes.
What’s ultra-cool is that the TVShows deamon that runs in the background is so tiny but so powerful. It automatically looks up your favourite shows every fifteen minutes and if there’s a new episode available on torrent it will download the torrent file and launches it in your default torrent client. I’ve never known it miss an episode of a show I ask it to track, and I’ve never known it to double-download a torrent, or to get the wrong one by mistake. In fact, you can even specify what quality/file size you want if there are multiple available. Truly, I’m in love.
This all being said, I still haven’t answered the original question properly. What made me shout out my proclamation of love to TVShows? Transmission, my favoured torrent client, just launched with this torrent:
Oh yeah, that’s right season five, episode one of Atlantis will be mine in less time than it’ll take to finish writing this post2. Boo-ya! now Season five isn’t due to air until July 11th (I think) and clearly this torrent file specifies this is a pre-air. The first two episodes of season four appeared as pre-airs on torrents as well, and some of the visual effects and incidental music weren’t finished, so these may have similar problems, but like a true hard-core junkie I’ll be willing to overlook that to see the show three weeks early!
Though I could probably do a better job at the English! [↩]
Check out that *sick* upload rate. Damn do I seed well! [↩]
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of the Safari web browser on the Mac platform1 and others of you will know that in fact I use the nightly builds of the WebKit rendering engine rather than the official supported releases from Apple, as the nightlies tend to have newer functionality for only a very small stability hit.2 Well the latest update has got me very excited…
For those of you lucky enough to own a Mac you may have come across Adium, the multi-chat client that supports no fewer than fifteen different chat protocols. Well, prepare to make that sixteen, as Adium is set to support Facebook Chat in the next stable release. Woo hoo! (Though I actually don’t use Facebook Chat at all…)
Good news, Facebook fans! I’ve just finished adding Facebook Chat support to Adium for the next release.
A most interesting article about a hardware device you can hook up to a Windows machine to gain immediate and full access to the system, no specialist knowledge required. Scary stuff!
With Winlockpwn, the attacker connects a Linux machine to the Firewire port on the victim’s machine. The attacker then gets full read-and-write memory access and the tool deactivates Windows’s password protection that resides in local memory. Then he or she has carte blanche to steal passwords or drop rootkits and keyloggers onto the machine.
In a world wide web landscape where the choice of OS, browser, and engine are becoming more and more open and free the importance of standards in the way websites are written and displayed cannot be stressed enough. If a developer has to make hacks and workarounds to ensure his site displays correctly and uniformly on a browser then in my opinion that browser has failed in its single most important job: to correctly parse, render and display the site as it is coded1.
Chrome features are coming to WebKit
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