Archive for November, 2013

Faster Web Font Downloads, Disableable Font Kerning and Easy Hosted Apps

Published on in Blink, Google Chrome, Last Week, tech. Version: Chrome 32

The Blink, Chromium, v8 and Skia repositories saw 2,019 changes last week, made by a total of 419 authors. This update discusses them up to revision r237097.

Execution of failed <script crossorigin> references will now be blocked. The second argument to CSSStyleSheet.insertRule() has been made optional again because of compatibility issues. Sigbjørn fixed the event sequencing for XMLHttpRequest to be compliant with the specification, and Mike has been improving all the exception messages in Blink!

Web Fonts downloads will now be initiated immediately after style recalculation, rather than queuing it during layout, often reducing download latency by more than 100ms. The -webkit-font-kerning property has been fixed by Eli to actually work. The isolation: isolate CSS property, part of CSS Blending and Compositing, has been implemented for Blink in software mode.

Other changes made last week include:

Thanks for reading once again!

Read more (no comments) »

Vibration and Promises, Less Click Delays and Shutdown Sounds

Published on in Blink, Google Chrome, Last Week, tech. Version: Chrome 32

Last week, 1,869 commits made by 453 authors landed in the Blink, Chromium, Skia and v8 repositories. This update discusses them up to r232687. There wasn’t an update last week as I was in Dubai!

John disabled the ability to double-tap-zoom on websites which specify a width=device-width viewport, meaning the click delay of 300ms will no longer apply! Support for display: compact has been removed, support for SVG’s getStrokeBBox() method was implemented, and the CSS properties text-align-last and text-justify: none will now impact rendering.

Blink’s Shadow DOM implementation now supports the recently overhauled distribution algorithm for Shadow DOM. The hat and cat CSS combinators for Shadow DOM are now supported as well. Creating an <image> element using createElement() has been changed again, and will now return an HTMLUnknownElement. The innerHTML and outerHTML properties moved from the HTMLElement to the Element interface, making them available to SVG.

Tim landed a patch which pauses Device Orientation events when a page goes invisible, and aligned the orientational angles returned by Chromium with what the specification dictates. Finally, support for the Vibration API is now enabled by default. Also shipping is support for Promises!

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • Chrome OS finally got support for lock, unlock and shutdown system sounds!
  • Managed bookmarks, which cannot be edited or removed, were added to the Android New Tab Page.
  • Support for the Opus audio codec in the <video> element has been implemented.
  • Using AVFoundation on Mac OS X 10.7 and higher can now be enabled by a command line flag.
  • Building Chromium for Mac OS X will now default to Ninja as the build tool.
  • People search in Chrome OS has been enabled by default.
  • Overrideable SSL interstitial pages will now be having a yellow background rather than a red one.
  • The Desktop Capture API has been enabled for Chrome’s Beta-channel builds.
  • Early steps are being made towards supporting Certificate Transparency in Chromium.

Thanks for reading!

Read more (1 comment) »