CSS Animations and Transitions will now be driven by the new animations engine which will also power Web Animations. While Web Animations themselves are not enabled by default yet, this has already brought improved behavior and various bug fixes to Blink.

Keishi has brought <datalist> support to Android for most input types, which will be available starting Chrome 33. Meanwhile Fredrik has been fixing a broad range of issues in Blink’s WebVTT implementation, and Brendan added the “change” and “removetrack” events to TextTrackList and added support for TextTrack.id and TTL.getTrackById().

The base value of the “step” attribute of input elements will now be derived as specified in the HTML specification. Sandboxed iFrames can’t set document.domain anymore and the “overflowchanged” event will now be fired at the same time as requestAnimationFrame will fire. Finally, the first and last characters of a content-editable <div> element with display: table can now be removed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Usage of all deprecated v8 APIs has been removed from Chromium and Blink.
• Support for Promises has been implemented in v8!
• Experimental support for sub-pixel font scaling has been added to Blink.
• HTML Entities will now be highlighted in the Developer Tools’ DOM view.
• Support for Custom Elements, parts of Web Components, will be available in Chrome Stable.
• Chromium has been updated to use the Opus 1.1 beta-version.
• v8 now implements Math.ceil() via the highly optimized Math.floor() implementation.
• A command line flag has been added for running Chrome’s PDF plugin out-of-process.
• The Chrome-powered Android WebView may soon be able to use WideVine-based encrypted content.

Cheers for reading.

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:

• Hosted Apps can now be created from any website through a new menu option in Chrome.
• v8 switched the Math.random() implementation to JavaScript, and will now always inline it.
• Opacity, transform and filter animations for Web Animations can now be led by the compositor.
• Web Animations are now enabled as part of the –enable-experimental-web-platform-features flag.
• Multiple DRM-protected videos can now be played at the same time on Android.
• Chromium for Android will now support the Web Audio API on non-NEON ARM devices.

Thanks for reading once again!

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!

A series of changes happened in regards to supporting multiple profiles. The profile selection menu in Chrome’s UI is being changed from displaying an avatar, to displaying a drop-down box displaying the user’s name. In Chrome OS, the icons will only show when the user is visiting another profile in their session. A menu option for teleporting windows to another user has also been added. As usual, François already made a screenshot.

All CSS Regions will now create their own layers and stacking contexts. Properties of the experimental CSS Shapes implementation have been unprefixed, but prefixed aliases remain supported for the time being. Support for parsing the text-justify and touch-action-delay properties has been implemented. Forms submitted to a dialog won’t dispatch the close event on the dialog until all processing is done.

Support for ECMAScript 6′s Math.sign() method has been implemented as an experimental feature in v8. The htmlFor property of <output> elements is now settable, creating an <image> element using createElement() will now return a generic HTMLElement and columns in the window.onerror event will now be 1-based. Dominic added support for the onvoiceschanged event as part of the the experimental Speech Synthesis API.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The DevTools team is working on accessing unloaded Android tabs through remote debugging.
• The Sec-WebSocket-Extensions header will now be visible in DevTools for handshake responses.
• A new experimental method of overflow scroll landed: Universal accelerated overflow scroll.
• Work on the Mojo shell has started, and it’s already able to load HTTP URLs.
• Blink layout tests which run a series of assertions can now be written without expected results.
• An implementation of a TCP Server-socket API landed for Chrome Extensions.
• Android now supports faster sequential tapping on pages where the page scale is fixed.

Thanks for reading!

Animations in Blink are getting a large overhaul as the implementation of Web Animations is progressing, bringing along new features and a ton of bug-fixes. WebKit, by the way, announced their intentions to start working on implementing Web Animations as well.

JavaScript onscroll events will now fire at the same time as requestAnimationFrame(). A new form submission mode for dialogs, <form method=dialog>, has been implemented. The ArrayBuffer.isView() method has been implemented in v8, 2D canvasses now have the currentTransform property for accessing their transformation matrix and Erik started implementing the URLUtils and URL interfaces.

Blink can now synthesize small-caps for @font-face declarations with multiple sources, and transforming text to either upper or lowercase with text-transform now supports Turkic languages. Support for the column-fill property in the new CSS Regions-based multiple column implementation has landed as well!

Other changes which occurred last week:

• WebRTC video on Chromium for Android can now be decoded in hardware.
• The sockets.tcp Extension API has been revived for client sockets.
• A full QWERTY keyboard layout has been added as a Virtual Keyboard for ChromeOS.
• ChromeOS now features desktop switching functionality, including hiding other user’s windows.
• IndexedDB databases now use LevelDB’s Snappy, bringing much better compression.
• Yoav changed various systems to determine their instrinsic size based on srcset’s resources’s pixel density.

That’d be all.

Various changes were made in Chrome’s media stack last week. When using the Media Source Extensions API, support for Opus and MP3 as audio codecs has been implemented. Also new is support for VP8 alpha-playback, which means that videos can now have transparency.

Tables with display:inline set will now be rendered as inline tables rather than block elements, and border-spacing won’t be doubled anymore between table row groups. Philip also changed various JavaScript properties, such as offsetWidth and offsetTop, to only do partial layouts when they’ve been changed.

Arguments must now be passed to the CSSHostRule.addRule() and deleteRule() methods. The mousemove event has been made cancellable. Finally, the unprefixed onanimation* attributes have been implemented on HTML Elements, but won’t be exposed to the web until unprefixing has been completed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• DevTools’ go-to-location feature using <ctrl>+<p> now supports line numbers by using a colon: “:80″.
• Adding a webapp to your homescreen on Android will be available in about://flags.
• A People Search feature seems to be coming to Chrome, based on Google+ APIs.
• Spatial Navigation will be enabled for the Chrome-based Android WebView.
• The chrome.usb.getDevices() and openDevice() Extension APIs have been implemented.

That’d be all for this week!

Christophe deprecated the returnValue property on all events, and instead properly implemented the property on the onbeforeunload event. He made arguments mandatory on a ton of native methods, and fixed the <select>.remove() method to act as described in DOM4 is no index argument has been passed. Two weeks ago he also implemented the WheelEvent from DOM Level 3.

The preferred and intrinsic width calculations for multiple column layout have been aligned with the specification. Support for ellipses as primary citizens in the world of 2d canvas path segments has been implemented. The change which makes devicePixelRatio include browser zoom has now been enabled by default. Support for the paint-order style for SVG elements has been implemented, as has the object-fit property which aids in maintaining the aspect ratio of replaced contents within its content box.

As for experimental features, the viewport will be reset to its implicit size when @viewport rules at-rules are being dynamically removed. The escape key may now be used to dismiss an active <dialog> window, which have also been made ARIA-aware and are now able to fire close() events. Work on unprefixed CSS Animation also continues, now with the CSSOM part.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• A more convenient way of adding shortcuts to the launcher has been implemented for Android.
• Android will now start offering corrections for <input type=text> fields.
• Lots of work is going on in Chrome’s Cast implementation with very unclear descriptions.
• Speech recognition from the Web Speech API can now be used in more accessible content_shell builds.
• More polishing has been done on the chrome://inspect page for devices.
• chrome://inspect is now able to display the visibility, position and size of Chrome-based Android WebViews.
• Chrome extensions are now able to report runtime errors to a specialized error console.
• The console namespace (i.e. console.log()) are now available in Web Workers.
• PNaCl has been enabled by default for Chrome 31 again.

Thanks for reading!

Within Chrome DevTools, work continues on implementing the new Layer panel. The <Cmd/Ctrl>-<\> shortcut has been added as a shortcut to pause and continue the debugger. Mike has been busy with improving messages shared by Blink for errors and exceptions: anything from XMLHttpRequest to localStorage and tainted images for WebGL will now throw clearer errors.

The window.devicePixelRatio property and the resolution and -webkit-device-pixel-ratio Media Queries will now be affected by the applied browser zoom. Julien started with removing support for the prefixed -webkit-marquee CSS properties and CSS Shapes now supports shape-outside image values, and can be enabled using their own runtime flag. Support for the text-decoration property shorthand landed again as well.

XMLHttpRequests in Blink do now support “json” as a responseType. Support for .wav files has been brought to the Web Audio API on Android. Accessing a cross-origin frame’s location setter may now throw an exception. A new about:flags entry also has been added for an experiment in which touchmove events aren’t being distributed to the renderer anymore. Finally, the DataTransferItemList.remove() method has been implemented.

When building Chromium for Android, the “chromium_testshell” target is the most complete browser you can build. Tommy has now updated it to include a menu option for signing in and out of Chromium.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Chromium’s version number is now equal to the number of ice cream flavors sold by Baskin-Robbins.
• The interactive autofill dialog feature will be experimentally available for Android.
• Chrome for Mac will display a voice search omnibox icon for search result pages.
• A second version of UDP Socket APIs for Chrome Extensions increases performance significantly.
• Work on a Desktop Capture API for Chrome Extensions has started as well.
• Chrome’s App Launcher on Mac OS X has a new icon, because the previous one was too big.
• Alexis started preparations for unprefixing Blink’s CSS Animations support.

Thanks for reading!

Chrome DevTools continues to make debugging mobile pages easier, this time by adding support for port forwarding on chrome://inspect. It works for both local and remote servers, and is amazingly simple to use. They also switched to using rjsmin for JavaScript minification, and are working on a 3D layer view.

The Downloads Extension API has been promoted to the Stable channel, and will be available starting Chrome 30. Also new is a discussion group for talking about the Google Cloud Messaging-powered pushMessaging extension API.

Work on the Chrome-based Android WebView continues and support for displaying fullscreen video has been implemented, with in-page video support pending. The Remoting application for Android now supports paired authentication and had some UI polishing done.

v8 added experimental support for the Array.prototype.find and findIndex methods, part of ECMAScript 6, and now natively supports ArrayBuffer, DataView and typed arrays by default. Blink has been updated to use v8′s implementation of these instead of its own. Blink now also sets the Prototype of the interface object to that of its parent’s. Finally, Promises will be exposed in Worker-threads as well now.

Web Component’s ::content pseudo-element and :host pseudo-class have been implemented. Julien implemented support for named grid areas for Blink’s CSS Grid Layout implementation, and SVG’s stroke-dasharray CSS property has been made animatable.

Christophe Dumez improved Blink’s specification compliance for Text.splitText(), NodeList.item() and HTMLSelectElement.item(). The document.hasFocus() method will now return false when a tab doesn’t have focus, and the imageSmoothingEnabled property on a canvas object has been unprefixed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Images’ context menus now feature an option to search by the image on the desktop and Android Chromes.
• Support for the Device Motion API has been enabled by default by Tim in Chrome for Android.
• Sami enabled support for WebGL on Android, providing the context robustness extension is available.
• The Vibration API is now available for Android as part of the Experimental Web Platform features flag.
• HTML Imports now supports the “load” and “error” events, and can be enabled from about:flags.
• Support for PNaCl has been disabled for Chrome 30 again.
• Adam published an excellent document describing the String-types in Blink.
• Chrome OS’ virtual keyboard now supports Swipe-type gestures for typing.
• Mike’s busy improving the error messages issued by Chrome. Check out the survey too!

More next week!

Takashi landed a fast path for querySelector(All) containing a single ID, class or tag selector, yielding impressive performance improvements (up to 9480%!). Meanwhile, Alpha improved decoding time of gif images by 12%.

Chrome for Android has gained support for MSE and ClearKey-based EME, which may or may not be available depending on the device’s configuration. Anti-aliasing has also been disabled for the Chrome 29 release.

The API exposed by the experimental IME API has been aligned with the latest Editor’s Draft. document.implementation.hasFeature() will now return true for any non-SVG feature and the equally exotic compareDocumentPosition() method also had it’s behavior aligned with the spec. Blink has also switched to using v8′s implementation of typed arrays rather than its own.

The proprietary -webkit-svg-shadow CSS property has been removed. Height calculations for tables which use spanning rows have been improved and parsing of the “column: auto <length>” syntax for the multi-column CSS properties has been implemented.

A new experimental Web Platform feature (available in about:flags) are unprefixed Shadow DOM APIs. Exciting!

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Support for PNaCl has been enabled by default for all desktop versions of Chrome 30.
• The in-development Chrome-based Android WebView will have “Mobile” in its user agent for phones.
• Jochen improved Chrome’s popup blocker to not load popups at all, rather than just hiding them.
• The HTML Imports feature will be respecting the set Content-Security-Policies.
• Various improvements and additions were made to the chrome.downloads extension API.
• Chrome’s “You are offline” page will now display a fancy dinosaur!

There won’t be an update next week because I’ll be on holiday in New York . Thanks for reading!