Timelapse is an experimental fork of the WebKit project that implements interactive record/replay for web applications. Timelapse's modifications to WebKit consist of 1) deterministic record/replay infrastructure and 2) a new developer tool (inside Web Inspector) for creating, browsing, and navigating through captured recordings.

Timelapse is part of ongoing research in the Computer Science and Engineering department of the University of Washington. Instructions for building, running, and contributing to Timelapse are on GitHub; for general information about Timelapse-based research, visit the project homepage. The project FAQ page answers some common questions about supported browsers, platforms, and future work.

A binary version of Timelapse is created monthly, based on recent Timelapse development and upstream changes to WebKit. You can download the latest binary from the project downloads page.

Simply run the following from a well-connected computer:

git clone https://github.com/burg/timelapse

The repository is several gigabytes in size, so it will take a long time to clone (sorry!).

Timelapse works with recent versions of OS X and Safari. Support for other operating systems and browsers is planned, but has not been actively explored. The stated versions below are what we know will work; other versions may work, but are untested.

• OS X 10.7

The following are additionally necessary to build WebKit and Timelapse:

• 4 GB of RAM (necessary to link Debug builds without dynamic paging)
• XCode 3.1.4+ or 4.3+
• git 1.7+

The mechanics of building, running, and debugging Timelapse are the same as for WebKit, and described on the WebKit project page. Below are some differences from the standard instructions.

Debug builds are started like so:

Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --debug --timelapse

And release builds are started like so:

Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --timelapse

When everything has built, you can launch a Release version of Timelapse using:

Tools/Scripts/run-safari

Timelapse is open source research, and we encourage code reuse and contributions by others. If you have code or ideas for new features , send a pull request against the timelapse branch.

More details on contributing to Timelapse are available on the Wiki page Note using git and GitHub.