Sunday, May 4, 2008

acid3 and webkit on hardy

I have been fascinated with the rendering of web pages by Safari. Always liked it, it has a certain edge to it when talking about the look and feel. When I read more, it turned out that the rendering engine is similar to Konqueror (somewhere I read that its actually based on open source libraries from Konqueror).

I dont have a mac so I cant really experience it first hand, but the windows release of Safari made me get my first experience.

This weekend, I was surfing net when I came across "webkit". Reading a bit more about it informed me -
WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60's S60 WebKit development.
This made me think, if its actually open source to start with, the code must be available and may be I can compile it for my system.

Well, I didnt had to look much further... search produced this link...
http://blog.kagou.fr/post/2008/04/21/Test-Webkit-on-Ubuntu-Gutsy-and-Hardy

However, my first attempt at compilation failed, due to lack of one of the packages. libxt-dev

So, now the list of pacakges that should be installed on hardy to compile webkit would look like this :

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool bison flex gperf libicu-dev libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev build-essential libxt-dev

The sample browser, gives me 98 on acid3 (acid3.acidtests.org). Though very minimalistic in capabilities, this is the best score for acid3 that I could get on my system.

Here are my scores
Firefox 3 beta 5 : 71
Flock : 51
Opera 9.5 beta 2 : 78
Midori (webkit based) : 64
Webkit minimal browser (nightly build r32862 ) 98

On my windows partition as well, none of the browsers went beyong 70's. Best being opera at 71.

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