By Staff | Published: January 13, 2009

Latest WebKit nightly build includes built-in update functionality



Many thanks to everyone who makes the awesomesauce that is WebKit possible — particularly the fine folks who man the Webkit feeds on Twitter, with whom we are presently working to quash a difficult to reproduce bug affecting Facebook cookies/login sessions. You do world-class work, and on behalf of the entire community, we can’t thank you enough!

One thing we would be interested in seeing, that said: Webkit nightly builds, with similar auto-update functionality, for IPA (“App Store” — iPhone & iPod Touch) iDevices. After all, “mini-Safari” has bugs & new features too; the community should be able to help at least as much as it does with the Mac OS X version. In fact, a “crash reporter” for IPA, similar to that employed in OS X, would also be welcome; we can’t even begin to count the number of reports we could have submitted in recent weeks were that capability available to us….

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  • admin

    By the way, for those interested: build 39852, released last night, was updated a short time ago with the new Sparkle-style internal application-update framework to build 39872 (a quite respectable build iteration in under 24 hours; Apple and the many contributing third parties deserve considerable praise for the quality of their collaborative work process!).

    We reported a bug on 39852 shortly before noticing that 39872 had been posted, a rather embarrassing circumstance to be in. One wonders if future builds could allow for some sort of push-notification or active time-polling system, short of 24 hours, to let the really advanced users who might want to submit bugs using the “Bug Button” rather than only when CrashReporter comes up on its own…..be ensured of submitting bugs based on something confirmed to be reproducible in the current build.

    Of course, odds are if we found a valid bug in Webkit/GMail, then it still exists in 39852 since it would appear to be a rare and difficut to reproduce bug similar to something we noticed a while back with Facebook and cookies/sessions….but still, something we hope we’ll have the chance to talk to the project maintainers (or someone able to field such questions, in a spare moment — we’d hardly press them for anything “insider” being public faces of the company under considerable pressure to be discreet with whatever little truly “insider” information they might be privvy to!) at some point down the road.

    In any case, we can’t recommend the Webkit version of Safari enough, provided that you’re a user savvy and comfortable enough with “living on the edge” regarding nightly builds of this sort to accept the (surprisingly small, usually — but there aren’t any of the guarantees one gets with an official release!) risks that go along with it.

    In the recent past, Webkit users have been treated to powerful features, many of them similar to or even superior to what we’ve been seeing out of Google’s “Chrome” project (which we’ll be looking at very soon, BTW, as well, in its current ‘TestShell’ incarnation with its own nightly builds)…..which users of Safari didn’t get to use for months — and in some cases, have yet to be able to use at all.

    So being a member of the “Webkit.app nightly-grabbers’ club” certainly has its benefits.

  • admin

    ….and while we’re at it, if you enjoyed the additional content provided by the above comment, you’ll want to be keeping an eye on this space; perhaps even taking the time to submit comments & questions of you own.

    They’re still moderated, and we do have some issues to iron out with our traffic-balancing technology that causes page reloads which shouldn’t affect comment posting but seem to nonetheless…..but if you submit a non-flaming, non-offensive comment we’ll do our best to ensure that it gets on the site — and that your questions, if any, will be answered.

    Even some time after the original article was posted to our front page, there will be significant new updates & activity in the comment threads which follow many of our articles. We hope you will take the time to read them, and keep up with them after reading the original article — even if you’re too busy at the time to participate.

  • jms

    I know this is very old news by now, but just today I was wondering about that and your article was exactly what I needed! Thank you.

  • http://metapep.wordpress.com/ pepijn de Vos

    @jms: same for me, I'm downloading Webkit now.

  • http://metapep.wordpress.com/ pepijn de Vos

    @jms: same for me, I'm downloading Webkit now.