I am often guilty of tip-toeing right up to the bleeding edge of technology. While I generally don’t recommend that, occasionally my desire for instant gratification gets the best of me (I download nightly builds of WebKit). Such was the case with the recent Safari 3 beta release.

Latest, browser.

Check.

From Apple.

Check.

New Features.

Check.

So after downloading, I surfed a bit. It seemed solid. It soon earned a place next to Camino, Firefox (gotta have the extensions or it would just be Camino), and Opera in my Dock.

Fast forward a few days and Mail starts exhibiting some strange behaviour. It seemed to no longer include quoted text in forwards, followups and replies with attachements.

Now, I do have some bundles installed so one by one I removed them and the problem remained. I went Google-crazy and initially didn’t find anything. Am I the only one?

Finally, after a few more days, things started to pop up. The culprit was Safari 3 beta. What did the browser have to do with my email? It turns out quite a lot since components of Safari are used to render emails. Uninstalling the beta brought everything back to normal.

This was a relative harmless reminder of what the term “beta” really means. Oh well, gotta go. There is a new nightly build of WebKit available for download.

For more information on this issue, visit Apple Support Discussions.