This was worth downloading the latest WebKit nightly for. I first tried it in Safari 4.x, and was underwhelmed. I then tried the latest nightly, and was very impressed. This, coupled with hardware acceleration for the 3D transforms, could seriously eat away at the sort of territory owned by flash and silverlight.
The unfortunate part of this is exactly as you say--you first tried it in a bleeding-edge version of Safari, and it wasn't good until you updated to the latest nightly build.
That doesn't bode well for performance in other browsers like Firefox--let alone IE.
To clarify, it wasn't performance that left me wanting. It was still a usable Flickr browser. It just didn't live up to the headline until I tried the nightly. In other words: it degraded well, and this is actually a terrific validation of the extensibility built into the CSS spec. This isn't like the old days where you couldn't log into your online banking without IE. So I disagree: it bodes quite well, IMO.
I'm doing a project that could use the Webkit 3D abilities that have now been added to the nightly. Finally, yay! How long till this shows up in Safari though? What's the regular release pattern for these kinds of additions?
According to the site, it already works in Safari on Snow Leopard and on the iPhone. I would expect it to be part of the regular Safari release within the next two months.
I love this cool experimenting that Apple is doing, even though there probably won't ever be widespread real-world use (unless developing specifically for Safari).
Are you kidding? This will be available on a massive actively-used and well-differentiated install base: every iPhone, Android, and Pre device.
Though it's kind of depressing that it's easier to get people to sign 2-year $2000 mobile contracts to get decent phones than it is to get them to just stop using IE for normal browsing.
