[mediastech.com] — Media, Society & Technology

In my current development projects, I’ve been using a lot of new features of HTML5/CSS3/etc, and fortunately the different browsers have been adding support at a fast pace. Of course, features don’t appear right away in the stable releases that everybody runs, but rather in various alphas, betas, and other pre-releases, with the most bleeding edge being the nightly builds. These builds are (usually) compiled every day, reflecting the current state of the source code repository, with all the latest changes made by the developers.

It’s quite a hassle having to download and install a new version of three or four browsers every day, so I made a Mac OS X app for each browser (Apple Safari aka WebKit, Google Chrome aka Chromium, Mozilla Firefox aka Minefield, and Opera) that checks if a new version is available, automatically downloads and installs it, and then launches it. If you already have the latest version, it will launch or focus it directly, allowing you to have only those 4 icons in the dock, and always use them to access your browsers.

Click here to download them.

FYI, using the latest builds of each browser (as of 2009-6-9), here are the results of html5test.com :

• WebKit : 220 + 7 bonus points
• Chromium : 217 + 6 bonus points
• Firefox : 176 + 9 bonus points
• Opera : 129 + 4 bonus points

For those interested, these apps consist of bash scripts embedded in AppleScript app-bundles, so you can modify them for your own needs (note that by default they are setup to install Intel and/or 64bit builds when available). Please share any enhancements or fixes you might make.

Update 2010-6-12 : Fixed the Firefox updater, so you can use it on 32bit system by changing the line :
my_arch=”mac64″;
to :
my_arch=”mac.dmg”;