Archive for September, 2011

CSS Filter Effects, Extensions Settings API and seamless GCF updates

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 16

Last week, 539 changes landed in WebKit’s repository and 824 landed in Chromium’s, totaling up to 1,363 changes. Highlights include start of the CSS Filter implementation and lots of removed code within WebKit.

The Extension Settings API has been implemented for Chromium! This new API will allow you to specify settings for your extensions which will then be synchronized to the user’s Google Account, similar to your bookmarks.

Google Chrome Frame has been updated to no longer show a security prompt after it has been updated without re-starting Internet Explorer. This improves the user-experience for those stuck to IE quite significantly.


For those using Web Inspector on Windows, saving the timeline data is now working again. Callbacks originating from requestAnimationFrame will show up in the timeline panel, and the Metrics sidebar pane for the Elements panel will now be drawn at all times. Outlines have been removed from this pane as well, considering they’re not part of the box region.

Two more tests from the CSS 2.1 test-suite are now passing, getting a non-premultiplied image from a WebGL object will now yield the expected result and positioning issues with :before and :after pseudo-selectors used with tables have been fixed.  Finally, Apple finally implemented Function.prototype.bind for their JavaScript engine, and also aligned the String.prototype.split implementation with ES5!


Quite some cleaning up has occurred within WebKit as well, for one, the BREWMP and HAIKU ports have been removed as they weren’t being maintained anymore. similar to the implementation of WCSS. Several features, such as Application Cache and Server Sent Events have been enabled for all ports, and clearing of other miscellaneous compile-time flags started as well.

As for new features, Dean Jackson announced to start implementing the CSS Filter Effects, an effort led by the SVG and CSS Working Groups, enabling effects such as blur and drop shadows to occur on a page. Besides the implementation itself, investigation will be done as to enabling the effects to be animated and to be  accelerated.

Other changes from last week include:

  • The chrome://settings/extensions page has now officially taken over from chrome://extensions.
  • The Console Extension API for the Developer Tools has now been exposed to extensions.
  • The team-page on WebKit’s website will now be auto-generated from committers.py.
  • Performance improvements of 1.4%, 4%, 1.4% and 2% for Apple’s JavaScriptCore engine.
  • Corners of elements being manipulated using CSS 3D Transforms will now anti-alias correctly.
  • Redrawing the dirty parts of a large table has been optimized by adding additional caching.
  • Similar to Chromium, using OVERRIDE and FINAL annotations in code is now possible in WebKit.
  • Apple seems to be interested in using the Web Audio API, as they’ve added run-time settings for it.
  • Clicking backspace to merge a header with a paragraph won’t produce a span element anymore.
  • The Qt port has started implementing the JavaScript Full Screen API.
  • Implementation of DOM Mutation Observers seems to be starting in WebKit.
  • Animating the alpha value of a composited layer within Chromium is now possible.
  • Preparations are being made to move Grit to its own open source project.
  • An entry in about:flags has been added allowing people to disable WebGL.
  • Chromium on Mac OS X systems has now switched to using Skia as the default graphics layer.
  • The Image Gallery has been made more ribbon-like for Chromium OS.

And that’ll be all again.

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Clipping to border radiuses, the Download API and Border Images

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 16

WebKit’s repository received 460 commits during last week, while Chromium’s repository received 939, totaling up to 1,399 changes in a single week. Highlights include progress on the Download API, layers being clipped to border-radius and a completely implemented border-image.

Implementation of the download extension API in Chromium is continuing at a steady pace. Last week support was added for the onCreate and onErased callbacks, together with an implementation of the download() method. With this, the most basic behavior should be functioning.

As for specification support, the PeerConnection constructor has been renamed to the prefixed webkitPeerConnection, indicating that it may get enabled soon. Apple’s experimenting with removing the ability to call most collections, ruby text won’t overhang more than half the width of the neighboring text, the flex-align values have been renamed to match the specification and regions no longer slice line box render.

Work is continuing to support event constructors in WebKit. During last week, patches landed to support constructing ProgressEventErrorEvent and HashChangeEvent, among various others for both V8 and JSC. WebKit’s hyphenation won’t wrap anymore between hyphen-minus and numeric characters, and changing the document.title variable will now affect the contents of the title element in XHTML documents.

WebKit’s implementation of the border-image CSS property went unprefixed, followed by a series of patches finalizing proper support for the property. Meanwhile, Dave also fixed overflow clipping to border-radius to work across layers.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And that’ll be all again. For this week, keep an eye out on Motorola’s interest to implement HTML5 <time>.

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Chrome 16, revision 100,000 and isolated Unicode BiDi

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 16

With 903 commits to Chromium and 438 commits to WebKit, a combined 1,341 changes landed to both repositories during the last week. Highlights include revision 100,000, all separate border-image properties and isolated bidi.

Starting last Friday, Chromium’s version number is equal to the number of ounces in an avoirdupois pound. Meanwhile, Kazuhiro Inaba landed revision number 100,000, beating five other people who accidentally committed right around that time as well. On to revision number 217!

A new user interface is being implemented in Chromium for errors and warnings. The wrench menu badge and icon were added last week, shortly followed by bubble views for Mac, Views and GTK. The bubble will initially be used for displaying synchronization errors, but may later on contain other messages as well.

Within Web Inspector, pressing F5 on non-Mac platforms will refresh the page again as expected. Pop-overs will be disabled when a mouse button is pressed, suggestions in the Style sidebar pane can now be tabbed through infinitely and live editing for JavaScript and CSS has been made more discoverable. Finally, Chrome’s extension API for accessing the resources has been renamed from devtools.resources to devtools.network and the console API has been exposed.

As for specification related updates, the HTMLSpanElement object has been added and the HTMLBlockquoteElement has been removed. Change events for numeric input fields will be fired when the user reverts a script-made change, support for the parting the scoped attribute has been added, in preparation of supporting scoped stylesheets and Eric Seidel finalized support for the unicode-bidi: isolate CSS property, together with the new <bdi> HTML element.

Three new CSS properties were added last week. Firstly, Dave Hyatt finalized support for the separate border-image properties by landing patches for border-image-width and border-image-outset, again with their masking equivalents. Dan Bernstein landed support for the hyphenate-limit-lines property, even though Safari is still the only port supporting hyphenation.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And with that, yet another busy week of changes has been aggregated.

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Media Source, Binary Web Sockets, Accessibility and Border Images

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 15

With 563 commits at WebKit and 854 at Chromium, totalling up to 1,407 changes, it has been a busy week again. Highlights include addition of the Media Source API and support for binary Web Socket messages.

Dominic Mazzoni landed quite some accessibility improvements in Chromium for Windows. Dozens of roles and states have been corrected for a variety of elements, support for tables featuring row and column spans has been improved, and support for range inputs and live regions has been added. Finally, an onVolumeChange event has been added to the Accessibility Extension API. Mac work will follow soon.

Network related error messages in Web Inspector’s console will now link to the respective request in the Network panel. Furthermore, the window won’t grow anymore on every close-open cycle.

As for improved support for specifications, Chris Marrin landed support for requestAnimationFrame in the Mac. Text within a <dfn> element will now be italic, the WebVTT cue text parsing rules have been implemented, together with DOM construction and six new non-prefixed protocols are now supported by registerProtocolHandler. Top margins for table captions will now be respected, media elements have been taught the muted attribute, border attributes with percent values now work on images and column breaks are now more reliable with large line heights.

For folks using Web Sockets, WebKit now supports both receiving binary messages (as Blobs and ArrayBuffers) and sending binary messages (also as Blobs and ArrayBuffers). This is a huge step forward in supporting the new protocol. Meanwhile, Aaron Colwell implemented the Media Source API within WebKit, making it possible to dynamically append data to video playback.

Dave “scattered” Hyatt started to implement the CSS properties for border-image. Patches for border-image-repeatborder-image-slice and border-image-source have already landed, meaning only border-image-width and border-image-outset are left. Simultaneously, they have also been added for WebKit’s Masks. Sam Weinig and Kentaro Hara taught WebKit about various forms of Event constructors.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And that’ll be all again! 🙂

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