Archive for August, 2012

WebGL Inspection, Sticky Positioning and Windows 8 Updates

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 23

Last week saw 993 Chromium commits and 650 WebKit ones, totaling up to 1,643 changes in total.

Chrome binaries will now be signed with compatibility GUIDs for Windows 8, which mainly impacts theming in High Contrast mode and heuristics about potential compatibility issues. Furthermore, forwarding of search queries in Windows 8 UI mode has been implemented, and mouse input events from styli will no longer be ignored.

Web Inspector’s Profile panel is getting a great new (experimental!) feature from Andrey, namely WebGL inspection. The Timeline panel is now able to show the cause for a style recalculation, the console.time() method now uses performance.now() for more accuracy and more work has been done on improving performance.

Simon landed support for sticky CSS positioning, which limits an element to be positioned within both it’s container and the viewport. Support for parsing the -webkit-text-decoration-style has been added, the arguments for the blend-mode property can now be parsed and CSS masking and filters are now being applied in the right order.

Blob and File System URIs are now considered to be same-origin for Content Security Policy and computed styles for 2D Transforms have been aligned with the specification. An initial implementation of CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside property landed, WebKit didn’t miss out on the usual set of Flexbox improvements and David’s work on re-implementing Multiple Columns on top of CSS Regions saw two more commits.

The postMessage() function now accepts any kind of data as its message, allowing you to post arrays and objects as well. Changing the class attribute on any kind of element will now update the classList as well, and work is being done for allowing pointer lock in sandboxed iframes. The automatic DOM transactions feature for Undo Manager is now implemented, just like the item() method, and the undoscope attribute has been removed.

Another new feature which is in the works, is being able to use the “overflow-y” property as a way to make the render view paginated, as part of implementing the Generated Content for Paged Media specification.

Other changes which occurred last week:

To finish with some other nice news, yours truly became a full Chromium committer last week :).

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Filtering Network Requests, Blend Mode and two more CSP Directives

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 23

Last week, 764 Chromium commits and 615 WebKit commits landed, totaling up to 1,379 changes.

Especially for Web Applications, finding certain files in the Network tab can be difficult, as there can be hundreds. Web Inspector now gained support for filtering the display based on search results! The BlackBerry 10 user-agent can now be selected in the Settings dialog, and work is being done to improve performance by loading panels lazily.

Parsing support for CSS’ blend-mode property, defined in the CSS Compositing and Blending specification, has landed. The volume sliders for fullscreen and normal media elements will now stay in sync, the first call to webkitRequestAnimationFrame won’t return 0 anymore and z-indexes now work on flexible items without explicitly positioning them.

SVG Filters can now be drawn in the correct colorspace for WebKit ports which don’t use CoreGraphics. Mike implemented the plugin-types and form-action Content Security Policy directives, together with their respective DOM APIs, and support for author Shadow DOM is now available for the <meter> element. Finally, many more languages now have their localized quotes available for the <q> element.

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • The third-party storage blocking system now also covers WebSQL databases.
  • A compile time flag was added for the new CSS 3 text decoration properties.
  • Chromium received a new audio render method supporting synchronized input and output.
  • Sticky CSS positioning has been enabled on Apple’s Windows port.
  • DNS Prefetching has been enabled for the BlackBerry WebKit port.
  • Gyuyoung Kim is the latest member of the WebKit Reviewer team, congratulations!
  • Within Chrome OS, the offset for a secondary monitor can now be set.

Various new features are still under development in WebKit, and may be near the horizon: @supports and parts of Generated Content for Paged Media (GCPM).

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Chromium 23, CodeMirror Editing and a flag for CSS Exclusions

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 23

Last week, 831 commits were added to the Chromium project and 665 to WebKit, totaling up to 1,496 changes.

Jim Carrey is going to be very pleased with this change made by Anthony last week, namely kicking Chromium to Number 23. You can read about many changes made for Chrome 22 in this series of articles.

Web Inspector’s editor can now be replaced with CodeMirror by Jan Keromnes, as an experimental feature. It supports basic editing, search, replace and saving, but much more work is to be done before it’s completely usable. The function scope is now visible in the UI, and support for two CSS Region events has been added to the protocol.

A new “all” value for the -webkit-user-select property can now be parsed and initial support for text-decoration-line landed. Four more bugs in the Flexible Box Module implementation were fixed, namely the lack of support for inline flexingpercentage sizing in quirks mode, percent-based margins and behavior when using box-sizing.

ArrayBufferView objects can now be send through Web Sockets, the indexed getter for Microdata will now return undefined instead of empty strings, classList can now remove classes with uppercase characters and window.URL has been unprefixed. The <progress> element now supports author Shadow DOM. Content Security Policy now is nosier about errors and more work was done on CSS Region’s CSSOM implementation.

In terms of new features, a compile-time flag for CSS Hierarchies has been added, and work is being done on implementing Proximity Events in WebKit.

Other changes which occurred last week:

That’s it again, thanks for reading!

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Key Bindings for Extensions and Media Streams for the Web Audio API

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 22

A total of 1,599 commits landed last week, 745 for WebKit and 854 for Chromium.

Extensions using script badges will soon be able to use the Command API, allowing them to declare keyboard shortcuts for triggering events on an extension. Browser integration will become a lot richer with this addition!

The classList property moved from HTMLElement to Element, so may now be used with other types of elements as well — for example, SVG elements. Implementation of a MediaStreamAudioSourceNode for the Web Audio API has begun and audio destinations now support local and live audio input. For the CSS Regions implementation, the regionLayoutUpdate event will fire on the NamedFlow object now.

Sliders with a <datalist> attached to them will now have their handle snap to the available options, and an implementation for using <datalist> with color input-fields has been added for Chromium. The webkit prefix has been dropped from the Vibration API implementation as it reached Candidate Recommendation. Overflow will no longer apply to table rows and row-groups, instead, it only applies to block containers, and a bunch of improvements have been made to the Flexible Box implementation as well.

A setting and API has been added to WebKit2 ports, introducing an option to disable third parties from being able to store data. Besides blocking cookies, this will also encapsulate storage APIs such as localStorage.

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • An API has been added for WebKit2 ports introducing an option for blocking third-party storage.
  • Work is being done on re-implementing support for quotes and the <q> element.
  • Web Inspector’s User Agent setting screen has been renamed to Overrides.
  • The Pointer Lock API has been blocked for sandboxed iframes, and the old API has been removed.
  • Support for CSS Filters has been enabled for the BlackBerry port.
  • Chromium’s Mac OS X deployment target has changed to 10.6, deprecating Leopard.
  • Speculative resource pre-fetching has been enabled for 90% of the users using Dev or Canary.

Last week of the Olympics. Especially for those of you in London, enjoy!

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