Webkit’s developers have been working to make their little darling of a rendering engine the fastest and most standards compliant solution available. And, it looks like the investment has paid off. Webkit has announced that their Webkit core scored a perfect 100/100 score on the Acid3 web browser standards compliance tests.
For the purposes of web browsers, think of Webkit as the rendering engine that determines how the web-code is displayed as a webpage. Webkit was originally devised by Apple for use in Mac OS X’s Safari browser, and has now found its way into other browsers, including the iPhone Safari browser, S60 web browser, Android’s web browser, and others. Now, the announcement that Webkit is basically at the top of the game when it comes to standards compliance and speedy page rendering only points to continued improvement in the mobile browser segment. Faster web browsing on our mobile phones? Yes, please.
Interestingly, Apple almost simultaneously updated the iPhone SDK with a “beta 2” release. Among the changes in the revised iPhone SDK is the updated Webkit build that powers the iPhone Emulator’s iPhone OS 2.0 – Webkit 525.15 runs the show on iPhone SDK beta 2. With every iPhone OS update, Apple has updated the Webkit build that the iPhone Safari browser uses, and this latest iPhone OS is no exception.
The latest Webkit build available to desktop users is 526.1 – which indicates that the next iPhone Safari browser (assuming that the iPhone OS 2.0 that is used in the iPhone SDK Emulator will be released in a few months) could be really close (if not the same) to the same Webkit version that scored a 100% on Acid3.
Of course, the other mobile web browsers powered by Webkit will benefit from the Webkit team’s achievement. It’s just a matter of when the updated Webkit build will be implemented into the web browser and released to the public.
It should be mentioned that the Opera team managed to reach the perfect 100/100 score on Acid3 before Webkit, but Webkit is the only completely standards compliant engine currently available for public consumption – find the latest nightly build of Webkit here.