Mark this as nifty… VirtualSafari is a Web-based frontend for Apple’s WebKit HTML rendering engine. It makes it possible to host a website which looks like the Safari browser and allows the end-user to *load* pages rendered with the WebKit engine (see the demo). When you load up VirtualSafari in any browser, you are shown a window that looks like the Safari browser. Enter an url into a text box, and your URL is sent to a PERL script that processes the page in Webkit and sends it back to the VirtualSafari page. It should be noted that VirtualSafari is an application that must be run on a Mac with a working web server, so if you have one Mac in your office that is used for testing purposes, all PC client can remotely look at pages as they would display in Safari.

The Surfin’ Safari blog is releasing details on some Recent WebKit Features that will eventually find their way to the Safari web browser. Of note, CSS-3 support for background-size, border-radius, overflow-x and overflow-y as well as a 20-30% boost in JavaScript performance. These additions are available if you’re interested in checking out the nightly builds - otherwise you’ll have to wait until the next version of Safari.

GetWebKit! is a new browser for Windows that is based on WebKit, the same rendering engine that is used by Safari. The browser you install is named “Swift” and has been released as an alpha product. The interface is very bare-bones, but it looks like it could be a very useful tool to text how your pages might render on a Mac!

Safari Screenshot Compatibility Test is yet another way to test your websites in Safari. The nice feature about this service is that the result is returned in only a couple of seconds. The others I have used take up to a couple of minutes.

The latest nightly build of Safari now includes a JavaScript debugger. There are not alot of details about how the debugger works, but the partial screenshot looks promising.

A new feature has been added to the latest nightly builds of Safari/WebKit. The Web Inspector is a tool that lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window. You can find out more about this tool for web developers by reading Surfin’ Safari’s article titled - Introducing the Web Inspector.