For quite a while I was keeping my WebKit/Safari up to date by building from the latest sources checked out from the WebKit Subversion repository or by manually installing the lastest nightly build. Then Maciej Stachowiak pointed out NightShift to me and I’ve been using that since.

NightShift is a simple but very useful Mac OSX application that automatically downloads and installs the latest WebKit nightly build so that you don’t need to do it manually.

As far as why you might want to run WebKit to begin with, well, if for no other reason, you might want to try it just to be able to have access to WebKit’s Web Inspector tool. It’s basically a DOM/CSS/properties inspector similar to those in other browsers. But there are a couple of things that make it different:

Inspect Element

You can open Web Inspector by right clicking anywhere on a page and choosing Inspect Element from the context menu. The Web Inspector appears and highlights the corresponding DOM node, with the normal interactive DOM tree view to give you access to the rest of the DOM.

The Firebug extension for Mozilla/Firefox provides the same kind of context-menu Inspect Element function, but the WebKit feature has the big advantage of being, well, a feature (that is, actually integrated into the core product, instead of requiring installation of an extension).

Re-root the DOM-tree view

One problem with display of DOM trees is that in a complex page with deeply nested content, you can end up a with tree view with some severe indentation and that really gives you more information at one time than you really need. So what Web Inspector does is to give you a way to “re-root” the DOM tree view so that the view is reduced to just whatever part of the DOM tree you actually want to examine at that particular time. To cause Web Inspector to re-root the DOM tree view, you just double-click in Web Inspector on whatever DOM node you want to make the new root; then the rest of the tree disappears and you just have a view of that node and its child nodes. Sweet.