The underlying engine used by Safari and other HTML rendering applications in Mac OS X -- WebKit -- is persistently updated by an open-source team, meaning that you may not have to live with bugs afflicting the current release of Safari 3.0.x beta from Apple.

Though it may lead to decreased stability and other problems for final Safari releases, updating to a newer version of WebKit has proven highly successful in alleviating issues related to the beta releases of Safari. It can also provide substantial speed boosts.


As stated in the WebKit documentation:

"Performance is a top priority for WebKit. We adhere to a simple directive for all work we do on WebKit: The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower. We have a zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions. If a patch lands that regresses performance according to our benchmarks, then the person responsible must either back the patch out of the tree or drop everything immediately and fix the regression."

One of the reasons for the nightly WebKit build's stability is that it does not support any type of extensions, including Input Mnagers, Application Enhancers etc (we've noted several issues related to these, especially with regard to Safari -- here's our most stern warning) Apple should probably consider adopting the same policy for its Safari builds.

A MacFixIt reader writes:

"I recently downloaded the most recent (r24441) and have found that the problems that I had experienced in Mail and Safari using Spell Catcher have been fixed."

The current WebKit nightly build is 6.7 MB, and available for immediate download.