Use Safari 3 Without The 10.5 Webkit

We all know that though having Safari 3 is cool, but the big disadvantage was that it needed the entire webkit replaced, that hurt Dashcode/ Dashboard and Mail.app and iChat.app. I found this useful hint on Mac OS X Hints that explains how to use the Webkit nightly builds to let you use Safari 3 without hurting all the other apps that use the Webkit. The fix is quite simple and doesn’t require messing with the system files or restarting your mac. You also don’t lose the old Safari if you ever want to turn back to the 10.4.x Safari. First download the newest nightly build of the webkit from the site linked above. Once the download is complete drag the WebKit.app to your /Applications folder. Then, since it’s what you’ll use to open Safari 3 replace it with the current Safari icon in your dock. Now rename the current Safari.app to Safari_2.app so it remains there alongside Safari 3. Then download the Safari 3 beta from the above link. Extract the Safari 3.app by control-clicking on the installer and choosing “Show Package Contents”. Double-click on the “Archive.pax.gz” file to manually extract the files and paths. Look in the place where the disk image is, there should be “Archive” folder. Somewhere in it is Safari.app v3.0.2, move that into you /Applications folder. You can now use Safari 3 without hurting any other applications and without messing with any real system file and without restarting your mac. Enjoy, Alex

Added on 7-3-07: Use version r23841, more recent versions have a bug that makes this blog show up in bad ways (CSS issues).