Are you a VoiceOver user who’s frustrated with the bugs in Safari and is looking for a better option? Running a WebKit Nightly might be the solution you’re looking for.
WebKit is the “guts” of Safari, and several other web browsers. The part of the browser that takes the web page code and turns it into what we see on the screen or listen to with VoiceOver. Often when there’s something in Safari that doesn’t work properly for VoiceOver users, it’s actually WebKit which needs to be fixed. This is true, for example, for the bugs that currently prevent VoiceOver users from accessing within-page links or using the context menu to save linked files.
The WebKit Nightlies are versions of Safari which are built each night with the most up to date WebKit code available. They can be downloaded for free by anybody who’s interested in running them. So what’s the catch? There’s two possible catches:
- If you run any Safari extensions such as Saft or PithHelmet, there’s a good change they won’t work when you run WebKit. Safari extensions are very dependent on which version of Safari you’re running, so you can imagine the effect of running a browser that changes (potentially) every day!
- Because the code is very new, you’re running code that’s relatively untested. This means that although the old bugs might be fixed there could also be new bugs present as well. Recently the access key combination was redefined to use the VO keys (control and option) instead of just the control key, so a lot of previously useful access keys suddenly conflicted with keys used for VoiceOver commands. This is now fixed, but caused problems for WebKit Nightly users for a few months.
On the MacVisionaries mailing list, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis posted a useful spin on the problem of new bugs in WebKit Nighty builds:
While they may also contain new bugs, this is actually a blessing in disguise since you can report them via the WebKit bug tracker and increase the chance that they will not appear in the next version of Safari.
Because of the risk of new bugs, it’s always a good idea to keep a backup of WebKit Nightly before you update it. That way if you find new bugs you can go back to using your older version once you’ve reported the bug.
Despite all these warnings, running WebKit Nightly builds is generally easy and simple and rarely causes any problems. If it does cause a problem you can always just go back to using Safari as before, so it’s generally a good situation for all concerned. Let me know how you go!
Especial thanks to Esther and Mike Arrigo from the MacVisionaries list. They provided much of the information for this article.
Website: WebKit Nightly Builds
- Ricky Buchanan
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