It has been nine months since our last Web Inspector update and we have a lot of cool things to talk about. If you diligently use the Web Inspector in nightly builds, you might have seen some of these improvements, while other subtle changes might have gone unnoticed. Some of the Web Inspector improvements were contributed by members of the WebKit community. We really want to get the whole community involved with making this the ...

“Hello, Internet!” WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish. SquirrelFish is fast—much faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. Check out the numbers. On the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. SunSpider runs per minute Longer bars are better. What Is SquirrelFish? SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a ...

The new IE8 version targeting switch, announced on IEBlog and A List Apart, has been the talk of the web. Some web standards experts, like Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman see the switch in a positive light. Others, including Dean Edwards, Robert O’Callahan and Anne van Kesteren think the proposal is a bad idea. We don’t talk much about what other browsers are doing on this blog. While we’re happy to collaborate on web standards ...

Lately we’ve been talking about a lot of great new features in the latest development trunk of WebKit - features like web fonts, client-side database storage, CSS transforms and CSS animation. These features will likely make it to an official release someday. But I’d like to take a step back and talk about some older features, namely all the great stuff in our recent stable release. Apple recently released Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, including ...