It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that the mac or windows versions have, but it’s damn handy for testing safari compatibility without booting another OS.

To install/build it on ubuntu (hardy with the usual bells & whistles), proceed as follows:

First you’ll need some dev packages to build it with:

sudo aptitude install libqt4-dev libxslt-dev gperf bison libsqlite3-dev flex build-essential

Then get the latest source from nightly.webkit.org. Right now that’s r36309, so we have:

wget http://builds.nightly.webkit.org/files/trunk/src/WebKit-r36309.tar.bz2

The builds change almost daily, so check first, don’t just copy the line above.

tar -jxf WebKit-r*.tar.bz2
cd WebKit-r*/
export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt4/
WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit

This will take 30mins+ on a reasonable machine, so go make tea.

When it’s finished, you can launch it as follows:

WebKitTools/Scripts/run-launcher

And that’s it, we’re done. Simple eh?

Note: it will need QTDIR set for it to run. We exported it when we were building above, but it probably won’t be set when you try to run it next time. The simplest way to work around this is probably to just put the export in your .profile as follows:

echo "export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt4/" >> .profile

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