I’ve been a contributor to the WebKit project for a few years now, written hundreds of updates about the project and even published dozens of those on the official weblog, Surfin’ Safari. It’s a great community, one that I’m very proud to be a member of. Working on WebKit introduced me to a great amount of people and taught me an incredible amount of things.

To improve the open web through technical innovation and good citizenship.
A few weeks ago, Max Heinritz introduced the new Chromium Feature Dashboard, listing not just the implementation status, but also the maturity, interoperability and testability of Web Platform features in Chromium. With Blink, Chrome is taking this one step further and are introducing strict guidelines new features have to adhere to.

To fulfill our good citizenship mission, we need to be careful to add new features to the web platform in a transparent, responsible, and compatible manner. We measure success as moving the open web platform forward as a whole, not just as moving one implementation forward.

I’m both positively surprised by and very confident in the way that Google’s Web superstars (Alex, Dimitri, Paul, Eric and many others) are making this happen. Google projects, including Dart, NaCL and others, are subject to the same guidelines in introducing their changes to the Web Platform as any other participant, including our very strong preference for standardization and compatibility with other browser vendors.

Compatibility risk will be one of the most important decision criteria for enabling new web platform features for the new engine. A launch process has been introduced for new features which touch the Web Platform, which includes several public announcements and reviewing steps. This is not just limited to Googlers: whilst getting commit rights for Blink is similar to the Chromium project, there is a fast track available for WebKit contributors. I’m also very hopeful that we’ll soon be welcoming the first non-Google OWNER to the project as well.

I’m a Web Developer. Thank you for making my life even more complicated!
Paul Irish asked a question about a month ago: what is WebKit? WebKit implementations are not homogenous: they differ in anything from the code used for downloading resources to the mechanism used to display pages, as well as in supported set of features. Chromium, Safari and other implementations of WebKit should already have been considered as separate testing targets.

All browsers’ latest versions are absolutely excellent from a technical perspective. With Ian Hickson’s HTML parsing algorithm and all the rendering engines coming increasingly close to passing the entire CSS 2.1 test-suite, we’re almost at a point where the true foundations of layout on the Web are both standardized and interoperable between implementations. The Chromium project now intends to take this further by working with the W3C to make sure both conformance tests and the testing infrastructure can be shared between different browsers.

Another area which I’m very excited about is that Blink will be following Mozilla’s ideas in regards to vendor prefixes. While support for legacy WebKit vendor prefixes will be maintained in the short term, Blink will strive to avoid shipping vendor prefixed features to the Stable channel altogether.

The end of the Last Week in WebKit articles?
I’ve published 114 articles describing changes in the WebKit and Chromium repositories that occurred in the week before. I do still intend to continue doing so, however, they will address Blink changes instead of WebKit’s. I won’t be posting updates to the Surfin’ Safari anymore, although I am definitely grateful I had the chance of doing so for a number of months.

Personally, I’m really excited about this change. The scale of the Web Platform asks for an ecosystem which doesn’t just welcome participation and collaboration, but also has a fair and healthy amount of competition. Jake made a great analogy about Blink’s potential in the near future: Blink can do for layout and rendering what V8 did for JavaScript, although the improvements will be more gradual.

I’m confident that Chromium can use Blink to increase diversity, while driving innovation, as it has shown to be capable of in the past. For more background on the why, I encourage you to read Alex Russell’s great post on the announcement of Blink. Justin also sheds some light on the security implications of this change, and Paul Lewis also shared some nice insights.

Work has started enabling Web Inspector to report various CSS parsing errors, such as mismatched braces and missing semicolons. A menu has been added allowing you to customize the panels displayed in the toolbar, capitalization of menu items has been made consistent and IndexedDB data may now be cleared.

WebKit’s Content Security Implementation will now fire a ”securitypolicyviolation” event whenever violations occur, and will include the effective-directive key in violation reports as well.

Intrinsic sizing (i.e. min-content) now work on flexible box elements, and parsing for the -webkit-each-line value for CSS 3′s text-indent property got implemented as well. The Grid Layout implementation now supports default grid item sizing, and can parse the grid-auto-{column, row} CSS properties.

Apple’s JavaScript engine ninja Filip Pizlo filed a series of bugs covering some future plans and experiments in regards to JavaScriptCore. Ideas including changing it to a quadruple-tier virtual machine, allowing it to do more optimizations for longer running scripts, running the optimizer on awesome new threads and experimenting with LLVM as a backend.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Skia is now able to use an accelerated hardware path for feConvolveMatrix filters.
• The new calendar picker now has support for touch input.
• The QtWebKit port enabled support for -webkit-font-smoothing and kerning, when available.
• The Mac port now exposes a setting to remove scripts from the markup.
• Chromium now supports the Storage Quota API in workers.
• Chromium also received plumbing towards supporting the Speech Synthesis APIs.
• Font load events are now available behind a command line flag for Chromium.

I unfortunately won’t be able to share an update next week. Be sure to check out Šime Vidas Web Platform dailies instead!

Error messages displayed in Web Inspector’s console which contain long URLs will now have them shortened. WOFF fonts will now be recognized with their newly registered mime-type and the touchmove event will now be emulated within iframes. The Ace editor, which also powers the Cloud9 IDE, has been made available in the Inspector as an experiment.

The “width” and “height” directives for media queries now take full page zooming into account. The desktop version of -webkit-text-size-adjust has been removed, selector indexes got an extra bit meaning WebKit supports 8191 selectors again and a video’s line-height won’t inherit to its cues anymore.

Quite some updates were done in light of Web Components: touch events are now supported in shadow trees and work is underway to allow any HTML element to be a superclass of a custom element. The Web Audio API now exposes the maximum number of available channels, the WEBGL_compressed_texture_atc extension is now available and the default background of dragged images is now being properly set.

Regions will now be automatically generated for David’s new multiple column implementation. Meanwhile, Julien has made various changes to the CSS Grid Layout implementation, namely parsing of the the grid-{start, before} properties and the grid-{end, after} properties, resolving them and extending the grammar to support two positions for the grid-{row, column} properties.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Changing the calendar picker UIs in WebKit has been finished, making the appearance more concise.
• The WebKitGTK+ port has enabled support for the Web Audio API in development builds.
• Speech synthesis through the Web Speech API has been enabled for the Mac port.
• The BlackBerry port has also disabled support for MathML.
• A feature flag has been added for font load events, and a run-time flag for Chromium.
• iOS’ DumpRenderTree has been updated to properly test accessibility features.
• The visual appearance of Chromium’s audio indicator has been improved.
• Windows accessibility features have been plumbed down to bring support in the Aura windowing system.

Have a good week!

Web Inspector will now show raster tasks on the Timeline Panel. Furthermore, the various profiling tools, such as the JavaScript CPU Profiler, canvas profiler and the memory snapshots, have been moved in separate panels.

When enabling the CSP 1.1 implementation, the new directives will now work on the unprefixed header as well. The meta referrer directive will now be honored for window.open() calls,the X-Frame-Options header accepts the “ALLOWALL” value and no callback is required anymore for requesting a notification permission. Rules for up and down-mixing channels in the Web Audio API have been implemented, and collapsing rules for empty buttons have been corrected.

The :first-letter pseudo element is now being ignored in flexible box elements. Dave rewrote the stacking model for the new multiple column implementation to be spec compliant and made sure transformed objects show up. CSS Shaders’ non-separable color and luminosity blend modes have been implemented, and parsing of CSS’ transition-property property has been improved.

Work on refreshing the calendar picker in WebKit continues with various new components, among which support for scrollbars, a month popup view and a table view for the calendar itself.

One feature that is nearing completion is the threaded HTML tokenizer. Now that more tests have been fixed and some optimizations have been done, it’s been enabled for Chromium’s DumpRenderTree. Shortly thereafter Adam enabled the threaded parser by default for all of Chromium.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The amount of files to compile when changing WebKit’s network or clipboard code has been decreased.
• WebKit will now share the user agent string when opening a new Web Socket connection.
• A JavaScriptCore JIT for 64-bit Windows platforms has been implemented.
• iOS’ accessibility layout tests have been upstreamed to the WebKit.
• The registerProtocolHandler method has been disabled for Android, as it wasn’t hooked up yet.
• The GTK port has disabled MathML support in release builds.
• WebKitQt enabled support for the canvas Path object and for link prefetching.
• Chromium’s USB Extension API has been promoted to be a stable API.
• Philip Rogers has become a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!

That’s all again.

Chrome OS has increased the priority of tabs which are playing audio, making it less likely that they will be discarded in low memory situations. More exciting, tabs which are playing audio will now have a visual indicator displaying the volume, making it a lot easier to determine where these random sounds are coming from.

Web Inspector’s Timeline panel now shows the networking events associated with Web Sockets, i.e. creating the socket and receiving a reply to the connection handshake. The “undefined” keyword will now be lowlighted, and Pavel landed a basic console.table() implementation.

An implementation of Web Components’ document.register() function landed, making it possible for JavaScript to register custom HTML elements with WebKit. Date and time input fields now accept “24″ as a valid hour as well and the “reflected-xss” directive has been implemented as part of the experimental CSP 1.1 implementation.

Iframes now recognize the “allowfullscreen” attribute, whereas they already accepted the prefixed version. Furthermore, Mutation Observers have been unprefixed as well!

Several more tests have been fixed in the new multi-threaded HTML parser by implementing missing functionality and support for edge-cases. There are 25 failing test-cases remaining and the number of open issues is decreasing.

Dave continued his work on the new Region-based multiple column implementation, also taking the first steps towards specification-compliant painting of columns. Meanwhile, Julien continued his work on the implementation of the CSS Grid Layout Module, finishing the auto placement algorithm implementation.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• JavaScriptCore’s script source cache has been shrunk, yielding significant memory usage improvements.
• Support for the canvas’ Path object has been enabled for all ports, and separately in Chromium.
• An implementation of the DFG JIT for MIPS architectures has been implemented.
• An OpenCL implementation of the FEMerge filter landed, with many more on their way.
• The WebKitGTK port updated their media controls to be CSS-based rather than GTK-based.
• A Chromium flag has been added to toggle availability of the Apps and Extension DevTool.
• All settings in chrome://flags can now be reset to their default state through a new button.
• Stephen Chenney has become a WebKit Reviewer. Congratulations!

And that’s last week again..

Chromium’s version number is now equal to the number of species Captain Jean-Luc Picard made contact with in Star Trek’s The Next Generation series: 27.

Within Web Inspector, an option has been added to split the Elements and Source sidebars in two separate panes. DOM nodes are now being highlighted when hovering over them in the Debug panel, the ability to have whitespace indicators now is experimental and the re-do feature in the text editor will now move the selection past the text.

Support for the “ch” CSS unit has been added to WebKit, which matches the width and spacing of the “0″-glyph in the current font. The @supports at-rule now has improved error recovery, the “src” property in @filter at-rules can now be parsed correctly and the correct behavior of the -webkit-margin-collapse property has been implemented.

Changing an element’s border or padding will now re-layout its children, intrinsic widths on replaced elements -such as images- are now more accurate and Opera’s Morten Stenshorne made WebKit stop ignoring column rules wider than the gaps. CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside property now defaults to outside-shape, and shape-inside now supports circles.

Support for the ::distributed() pseudo-element, part of the Shadow DOM specification, has been implemented. Pablo also landed support for the CSS.supports() method, which is the DOM API specified in the CSS Conditional Rules module.

The threaded HTML parser has been updated to pass all layout tests, and the preload scanner has been enabled as part of the background parsing thread after parts of it have been updated to be therad safe.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• WebKit’s Web Intents implementation has been removed from the repository.
• The WebKit GTK port enabled support for CSS’ image-set and CSS Variables in development builds.
• Support for the Page Visibility API has been enabled for the iOS port.
• An OpenCL-accelerated implementation of SVG’s flood filter has been added.
• Enabling the threaded HTML parser can now be done through the –enable-threaded-html-parser flag.
• Ryosuke uploaded a replacement for CIA.

Cheers for reading!

In case you didn’t hear this elsewhere yet: Opera has announced that it will start using the Chromium port of WebKit as the rendering engine in their browsers. This is very exciting news, even though I’m sad to see an excellent engine like Presto part with the rendering engine playing field. Meanwhile, Apple more broadly started with upstreaming the iOS port to WebKit!

It’s now possible to change the dock side of Web Inspector by dragging its toolbar. There’s now an option to show composited layer borders and the JavaScript tokenizer can now detect round braces. Also recently introduced is the Continuous Painting Mode and the possible upcoming addition of a console.table() function.

Adam, Eric and Tony have been working on changing WebKit’s HTML parser to handle tokenization and parts of parsing on a background thread. On resource constrained systems, such as the Nexus 7 tablet, this yields improvements of at least 10%, with the maximum stop time going down by roughly 50%. Some of last week’s fixes focused on the preload scanner, timing of the load event and the XSS auditor.

WebKit’s Media Stream implementation has been enhanced with support for DTMF. Mike will be working on support for X-Content-Type-Options:nosniff and edit actions have been added for Bold and Italic commands. document.activeElement won’t return non-focusable elements anymore, the formenctype attribute now defaults to an empty string and FocusEvent got a constructor.

Rik started working on implementing support for the background-blend-mode CSS property to WebKit, which determines the blending mode of the background image. The vmax unit has been implemented, completing the vh, vw, vmin and vmax group, and language selection for the ::cue pseudo-element is now available. Grids now recompute their logical height after row or column changes, and WebKit can now parse grid-auto-flow.

In a series of just over a dozen commits, Gregg imported a slightly modified Khronos WebGL conformance test suite into WebKit. Sharing test suites is great, and I hope we can see more of this!

Other changes that occurred last week:

• The TestWebKitAPI test suite now works for iOS,
• The TestRunner library has been turned into a component for the Chromium build.
• An experimental gyp-based build has landed for the Gtk port, with build system talks being on again.
• Jer aligned WebKit’s Encrypted Media implementation with the latest specification updates.
• Google’s Chief Apple Polisher, Nico Weber, became a WebKit Reviewer. Congratulations!
• A flag has been added to Chromium for toggling composition of fixed positioned elements.
• Some plumbing by John on the Fullscreen API for Android.

No promises, but hopefully another article next week .

Chromium updated the libvpx library to include support for an early version of the VP9 decoder, the successor of the VP8 codec that’s currently used by WebM. Furthermore, though still behind a flag (also available in about:flags), WebM files containing audio streams using the Opus codec are now supported as well.

The Toolbar Icons in Web Inspector won’t be shown by default anymore. The gear icon immediately goes to the Settings dialog again. Newly added items to the Network Panel will now be applied to filtering and cookies can be sorted by their size again. The viewport-related warning messages have been cleaned up, a new warning has been added for scripts blocked by @sandbox and messages created by console.time and timeEnd() can now be filtered out.

Support has been added for the “widows”, “orphans” CSS properties, as well as for the “ruby-position” property. The text-orientation property now supports the “sideways-right” value and text decorations will now work correctly when text-combine is being used as well. Furthermore, out-of-range values will now be clamped to values the supported range. Applying SVG filters to elements through the url() syntax will now work even when the filter isn’t available yet, and CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside is now supported for multiple-segment polygons.

Elliot moved generated content in :before and :after CSS pseudo-elements to the DOM, which also means that supporting animations and transitions on them is close. The Shadow DOM’s ShadowRoot constructor is gone, XMLHttpRequests for blob data will now set their Content-Type header accordingly and status events will now be fired for <link rel=prerender> elements. The Web Audio API now supports an offline audio context and the ::cue pseudo-element for video elements now is supported as well.

Support for in-band text tracks is now available on the Mac port, and plumbing has been added to allow deferring displaying of text tracks to the embedder.

Following the final pieces of it’s implementation, Alexis enabled support for the new background-position offset syntax on several platforms before enabling it by default, and removing the feature flag altogether. Meanwhile Tab started on aligning WebKit’s gradient implementation with the specification, towards unprefixing.

As for more experimental features, work on implementing CSS Grid Layout continues with improved parsing and layouting capabilities. Rick started working on supporting -webkit-image-set() on cursors, too.

Other changes which occurred these weeks:

• All of Opera’s submitted <track> tests have been imported to WebKit’s Layout Test suite.
• Filip introduced a new profiler to the JavaScriptCore engine.
• Transferring large strings to workers through postMessage is now up to ten times faster for v8.
• The copy of the Acid3 test in WebKit’s sources has been updated to the latest version.
• WebKit’s old implementation of an Animation API has been removed from the code.
• A Web Inspector server for the EFL Port using WebKit2 has been added.
• A Chromium for Android performance bot was added to WebKit’s waterfall.
• The BlackBerry port enabled support for the image-resolution CSS property, and now uses libjpeg-turbo.
• The EFL port enabled support for WebGL by default.
• Chromium has enabled support for the Resource and User Timing APIs.
• The Apple Windows port enabled support for the <track> element.
• The EyesFree library was imported in Chromium for braille support, supposedly for Android.
• Support for the <dialog> element is now included in Chromium’s experimental WebKit feature set.
• A skeleton implementation of Google Now in Chrome landed.
• Local media streams (i.e. microphone input) can now be made audible through the <audio> element.

This will be the last update of 2012. Thank you for reading, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

A canvas’ 2D context’s globalCompositeOperation property now also accepts the various blending modes. The unpause() method on a MediaController object is now supported. Removing non-existent cues from a text track will raise an exception, and a media element’s textTracks property will now reflect the associated <track> element.

The :read-only CSS pseudo-class has been updated to work with date and time input types as well. The -webkit-mask-attachment property has been removed and the masking size has been added to the -webkit-mask shorthand. WebKit’s Multiple Column implementation now accepts “none” as the value for column-span rather than just one, and tables have started respecting the max-height property.

As for experimental features, Julien is continuing his work to implement the CSS Grid Layout Module in WebKit, and landed several more patches. Dave also landed another patch for the new Multiple Column implementation, and CSS Shaders’ input colors will now be clamped before being blended. More tests have been added for the CSS Device Adaptation implementation, and values provided through the meta tag won’t be clamped anymore.

Other changes that occurred last week:

• An OpenCL-based implementation of several filter effects has been added.
• A basic implementation of the Web Audio API’s MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode landed.
• Printing in a custom font on a <canvas> object can now also fall-back to other fonts if it’s unavailable.
• It’s now possible to run WebKit’s performance tests on Chromium for Android.
• In order to make performance profiling easier, the run-perf-tests script now accepts a –profile option.
• A feature flag has been added for an implementation of the HTML <template> element.
• The appearance of the Media Gallery dialog has been updated to a new style, as has print preview.
• Partytime has been brought back to WebKit!

On to Rome for the weekend .

Marcus^[1], Marja, Nat, Tony and others are working on a new cross-platform performance test framework in Chromium: Telemetry. Last week, support was added for running tests on multiple Android devices, recording replay files and several new benchmarks. Exciting stuff!

Web Inspector has enabled JSON previews for text/html XMLHttpRequests. Line numbers in the timeline panel are now searchable and pressing the Ctrl+End shortcut in the code editor will bring you to the last character again.

Erik continued with his renaming of DOM Exception names. The CSS Device Adaptation implementation is now able to apply the resolved viewport rules and, when enabled, exposes an API to the DOM. Text Autosizing’s display of nested comments on reddit.com has been vastly improved, changing relatively positioned elements to being statically positioned now puts them in the right spot and CSS Exclusions’ shape-outside values are now accepted on shape-inside as well. Alexis landed CSS B&B3-compliant parsing support for the background-position property.

The IDBDatabaseException object has been removed in its entirety. Initial infrastructure has been created allowing ports to handle in-band subtitle tracks, a new layer stack has been added to accommodate the needs of both the Fullscreen API and the <dialog> element, and biquad filter nodes for the Web Audio API now have a “detune” attribute.

The feature flag for the DAP Proximity Events feature landed. A few other potentially upcoming features were discussed on the WebKit mailing lists last week as well, namely using OpenCL for filters, Pointer Events, the Screen Orientation API and adding the <main> element.

Other changes that occurred last week:

• Some minor progress was made in hooking up the Fullscreen API for Android.
• James started working on Resource Timing tests, in W3C style so they can be submitted.
• The EFL port added support for using the ATK library for Accessibility support.
• Chromium for Mac switched to WebKit’s TCMalloc, improving DOM modification performance by up to 15%.
• Chromium enabled support for the datalist UI for datetime and datetime-local input fields.
• Qt separated all their code that depends on QWidget in a separate static library.

Quite belated, but better late than never :-)