Stefan Mileschin

Today Apple made an interesting announcement for developers regarding Safari. Safari is Apple's browser across all of their iOS and OS X devices, and the layout engine at its core is WebKit. WebKit was originally started as a project within Apple as a fork of KHTML, a layout engine developed by the KDE project. Today it's widely employed in many browsers on many platforms, with Google and Opera formerly using it and now utilizing a fork of WebKit called Blink.

Traditionally developers who want to use the latest improvements to WebKit have had to download WebKit nightly builds, which as their name implies, are builds that reflect the latest changes to the WebKit code base and are released on 24 hour intervals. This allows developers to test and develop against new features being added to WebKit, which later make their way to Safari and other WebKit-based browsers as well. Distributing nightly builds for developers is a common practice for large software projects, but in the case of Safari and WebKit it was not ideal in many ways. For one, it essentially made the version of Safari on a computer use the new nightly WebKit back end that was installed, which can lead to annoyances when trying to compare between the existing public release and the nightly build. It also disables features like iCloud integration for tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc, as the builds are not signed by Apple.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10199/...nology-preview