Posted February 20th, 2008, in: Technology

UPDATE: I’ve had to change this post.  I learned after posting this that WebKit is merely the rendering engine that Safari uses.  Although Safari updates will eventually include the latest ‘stable’ version of the WebKit engine, by running an instance of Safari using the latest ‘beta’ version of WebKit you can take advantage of improvements being made to the engine now, but at the risk of encountering bugs etc, which so far I have not.

Anyways, I’ve had a hard time completely abandoning Safari for Flock. It turns out, while Flock has some features I really like and use on a daily basis, as well as the ability to run FireFox Extensions, it is a little clunky compared to Safari. I found myself still using Safari because it’s FAST. It’s just a more efficient App.
And I just recently learned about WebKit.  Running Safari this way seems even faster than normal. They update WebKit on a nearly daily basis -seems like about every other day.

Anyways I’ve found that I’m using different browsers for different things. This is nice for two reasons. First, I’m taking advantage of each browser’s strengths, choosing which one to use depending on what I’m doing. Second, I’m addicted to Keyboard shortcuts and I love being able to Apple+Tab between the various things I’m doing.

One thing that would make doing things this way a lot better would be to have an aggregate view of my browsing history from across all the Browsers I use, Safari, Flock, NetNewsWire & FireFox. Then when I look at my history, it could be in chronological order regardless of the browser I used, but returning to an item in my history could open it in the same browser I opened it in the first time. Alternately, maybe a contextual (right-click/Control+click) menu could let me choose amongst them. I bet there’s a way to set this up using Automator, or maybe someone has thought of this and there’s an app out there somewhere. We’ll see.

Here’s what I use the various Browsers for as of today:

Safari w/ latest WebKit release

• System’s Default Browser… The articles that come in on the feeds in NetNewsWire usually get opened with this.
• Extended research sessions. I can’t stand waiting for Flock when I’m really trying to get some learning done or whatever.
• Quickly grabbing links and such while I’m blogging in Flock

NetNewsWire

• RSS/Atom Feeds for News, Blogs, continual queries of certain sites like craigslist

Flock

• My “HomePages.” Flock is set with three tabbed homepages, My WordPress Dashboard, FaceBook and MySpace. I don’t go too far from home with Flock
• Quick Web Searches via the add-on capable search thingy. I have stuff like dogpile, wikipedia and del.icio.us in there (and a ton more) (I wish pipl and definr would work in it)
• Generally I blog using Flock, Apple+Tabbing over to reading materials open in NetNewsWire, and the two instances of Safari I’ve been running at the same time (with and without the latest WebKit release).
• Flock’s blog editor comes in handy for quickly editing lite HTML while blogging, commenting or doing things like updating my MySpace (I’m such a dork).

FireFox

• I use FireFox for all the Extensions I don’t need to have in my face and clogging things up during normal operation. Stuff like the Google Toolbar, The Web Developer Toolbar, Etc Etc Etc… Ugh! Disgusting. I hate all the toolbars. So much clutter.

Safari

• I still find myself opening the normal version of Safari to have two history paths, or to be able to have one more space to Apple-Tab over to… But basically right now I’m mostly content with the “WebKit version.”

Anyways, I wish there was an automated way to always get the latest stable or near stable version of WebKit automatically…. It’s getting annoying constantly downloading disk images, mounting them, dragging the app, ejecting the image… An automator script maybe?