Archive for April, 2012

WebKit Contributors meeting, data-lists and HTTP pipelining

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 20

Last week, a total of 1,575 landed in the repositories: 923 for Chromium and 652 to WebKit. Highlights include the WebKit Contributors meeting, Web Inspector updates and support for <datalist> in Chromium.

Last Thursday and Friday, Apple kindly hosted the 2012 WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino. With contributors from many different vendors around, a large number of subjects were covered in presentations and discussions. Transcripts of most of these are available on WebKit’s Trac, including a group photo of all attendees.

An experimental Style Panel has been introduced to Web Inspector which mimics the interface of the Script Panel, which also features an open stylesheet-dialog. Cross-frame security error spam when typing in the console is gone, calling document.open() will now reset the Elements Panel and the Inspector is now shimming the startsWith() and endsWith() methods on the String prototype, anticipating implementation of Microsoft’s proposal.

Parsing rules of the :nth-*() pseudo-classes has been aligned with the specification. Clipping issues with the CSS drop-shadow filter have been resolved and the “-webkit-filter” CSS property will now show up when enumerating over an element’s computed style.

Support for the HTML5 <datalist> element has been enabled for Chromium. It provides similar functionality to suggestions by the browser based on what you previously entered in a text field, with the difference that these suggestions are provided by the website.

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • The WebKitGTK port has enabled the Web Timing implementation.
  • Performance of several String-returning DOM attribute and property getters has been improved for v8.
  • The localStorage.setItem() method cannot override methods on the Storage prototype anymore.
  • The footprint of an element’s attributes has been reduced to a minimum for common usage.
  • The IndexedDB implementation can now retrieve values or keys by IDBKeyRanges.
  • HTTP pipelining has been enabled for 10% of Chrome’s dev-channel users.
  • The Chrome OS window manager (Aura) now supports the three-finger swipe.
  • Chromium’s touch optimized UI will make menu items 40 pixels in height.
  • Linux users using display resolution larger than 4000×4000 are now able to view all of Chrome again!

Next week’s update will probably be a bit brief as I’ll be in Barcelona. Thanks for reading!

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Limiting -khtml- and -apple- prefixes, and location.ancestorOrigins

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 20

882 revisions landed in Chromium’s repository last week and 667 in WebKit’s. Highlights include removal of support for the -khtml- and -apple- CSS vendor prefixes in Chromium, and the new location.ancestorOrigins() method.

Work on Device Emulation in Web Inspector is continuing and now also supports dimension wrapping to mimic orientation changes, and a “fit to width” option which will inherit the browser window’s dimensions as the device’s resolution. Lines having a breakpoint will now show line numbers and the vertical timeline overview now shows the wall time.

Support for -khtml- and -apple- properties has been removed for most WebKit ports, including Chromium, after previous attempts failed due to compatibility issues. Background sizes are now correct if the page is zoomed out, the default box-shadow color now defaults to the element’s “color” property, the viewport-relative CSS units now work for Replaced objects (such as images) and the -webkit-image-set CSS property was enabled for the Chromium port.

The ancestorOrigins() method was added to the window.location object, Chromium now exposes the Battery Status API and a Mutation Observer’s attributeFilter is now able to deal with namespaced attributes as well. The contentNodes property for NamedFlows was added, JavaScriptAudioNodes now respect the number of output channels and timestamps used in WebVTT had their limits relaxed.

Split over a number of commits, Avi has renamed Chromium’s TabContents class to WebContentsImpl.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And that’ll be all :). Maybe see you at the WebKit’s Contributors Meeting!

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UI for date-input fields, Iframe’s srcdoc attribute and Flexbox updates

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 20

Last week brought 995 commits to the Chromium repository and 732 to WebKit’s. Highlights include work on the user interface for date-input fields and the “srcdoc” attribute for iframes.

The animatedPathSegList property for SVG path elements has been implemented, completing support for the animVal properties. Minor type updates were done aligning WebKit’s typed array implementation with the specification, the Web Audio API’s Oscillator and WaveTable interfaces have been implemented and plumbing for the new JavaScript Speech API continues.

Support for the CSS flex() function has been removed in favor of the flex property, which Tony Chang implemented and made animatable. Empty @media and @charset declarations are now being ignored, image-set updates dynamically when the device scale factor changes and syntax was updated for two CSS Exclusion functions.

Now that a user interface for color input types is available, next in line is an interface for the date and time input types. Kent Tamura has been working on implementing this, an early example of which can be seen here. Meanwhile, work has started on cleaning up and implementing support for <datalist>. The <iframe srcdoc> attribute is now also supported, allowing untrusted HTML code to leverage an iframe’s sandbox constraints.

Other changes which occurred last week:

As always, thanks for reading. Next week’s update may be a bit brief as I’ll be in the Mountain View area, also attending the WebKit Contributors Meeting!

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Color input, the Network Information API and Chromium 20

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 20

1,104 changes landed in Chromium’s repository last week, whereas WebKit’s received 792. Highlights include Chromium 20, support for <input type=color> and re-landing of the vw, vh and vmin CSS units.

Chromium’s latest version number is the only number with more than one digit that can be written from base 2 to base 20 using only the digits 0 to 9: version 20. Highlights of Google Chrome 19 include support for the CSS calc() function, quote some updates to the Extension APIs and support for mutation observers.

A skeleton of Chromium’s Content Shell for Android landed last week, which is the very first step towards being able to build an Android .apk file containing Chromium. Meanwhile, work on supporting Password Generation is also progressing with some new constraints and a user interface for Linux.

Support for IndexedDB in Web Inspector’s Storage Panel is now available by default. Line-endings won’t be re-set anymore after editing a file, heap snapshot parsing has been significantly sped up and the shortcut for going to the previous panel has been changed. Development on supporting snippets is ongoing, as is support for device metrics emulation.

After having been rolled out, support for the vw, vh and vmin CSS units has returned to WebKit. Flexbox’ flex-line-pack property has been implemented and two bugs around the flex-pack property have been fixed. Replaced elements now box-reflect and vertical-align and more progress landed for the new Multiple Column implementation. Finally, CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside and shape-outside had their “wrap-” prefix removed, and now occur in the list of computed style properties.

Support for the Network Information API landed in WebKit, currently only enabled for the EFL port. The “preview” state of the Page Visibility API has been implemented and toggling the “disabled” attribute on a fieldset element will now also effect all form associated elements it contains. Verification for the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header has been made significantly stricter, cross-origin behavior for XMLHttpRequests seeing redirects has been aligned with the specification, and  images will now have their error event fired when the CORS check fails.

Other changes which occurred last week:

If you’re one of the people interested in charting Dimitri Glazkov’s average arrival time in the office based on his daily good morning wishes to the #chromium IRC channel, Brett Wilson has the perfect solution for you: 6,143 indexed pages spread over 13 books containing all of 2011’s IRC conversations!

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