Web Inspector’s Timeline Panel has been extended with three graphs, all hidden behind the Experimental Settings option, showing information about objects and events in the DOM. Hovering over a function in the Script Panel may now show an overlay with general information and it’s source-code and elements within iframes are selectable again.

The Flexible Box module implementation has been taught about distributed packing and now supports scrollbars for overflowing content, also taking the flex direction into account. Furthermore, floated pseudo-elements within table captions will now be positioned correctly.

In order to verify whether ES.next’s let keyword will be compatible with websites, Apple has reserved the word from normal usage in JavaScriptCore. Support for Uint8ClampedArray has landed for both V8 as JSC, values for the dropzone attribute will be normalized and various issues with radio-button groups have been fixed.

In terms of the Shadow DOM, registering of scoped stylesheets with the scoped element has been implemented and an initial version of the <content> element is now available as well. Following an API change and the actual interface, Vincent Scheib’ Pointer Lock API has made it into Chrome Canary as well.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Zoltan Herczeg wrote a custom CSS Lexer for WebKit, doubling lexing performance!
• The parsing stage of calc() has landed in WebKit, following several new tests.
• The JavaScriptGlue folder in WebKit’s Source/ directory has been removed.
• WebKit’s Qt port now features tap feedback respecting the tap-highlight-color property.
• Parsing of the Content-Disposition HTTP header has been improved, aligning more closely to RFC 6266.
• Ryosuke is working on bringing performance tests to WebKit, to be visualized using Mozilla’s Graph server.
• Elements without attributes are slightly smaller, resulting in another ~0.23% memory improvement.
• Styles won’t be updated synchronously anymore after running a script.
• An about:flags entry has been added for enabling the Media Stream API, including getUserMedia.
• Another flag has been added to disable the GPU for accelerated rendering, falling back to software mode.
• A debug page for the Omnibox has been added as chrome://omnibox/.
• Storage Quotas are now available through the Extension Storage API, as the getBytesInUse method.
• An Extension API event informing about brightness changes has been implemented for Chromium OS.
• The Privacy Extension API has been moved out of the experimental namespace, as has the Storage API.

And that’ll be all again, thanks for reading!

Chromium’s content shell for Linux-based systems was announced on the chromium-dev mailing list on Friday, sharing the news that it’s now usable for day-to-day WebKit development. It uses Chromium’s content module but leaves out other parts of the browser, so it’ll be significantly faster to compile and run.

For free-flow HTML editing in the Resources Panel of Web Inspector, revisions will now be tracked. Unsafe cross-origin requests will now show a stack trace in the console, making them easier to track down and content in iframes won’t appear to be in the same document anymore when using the DOM Viewer. Finally, a screen-size emulation back-end has been implemented, which will eventually allow you to emulate mobile device screens!

The -webkit-cross-fade will now report the intrinsic size of the background, fixing rendering when the background-size property is being used. Baseline grid alignment has been implemented, as have the text-overflow property for input fields and parsing for the custom() function of CSS Shaders. Painting background colors for regions has been re-enabled, and regions will now be exposed to the DOM.

WebKit’s Device Orientation implementation has been updated with the absolute property, which indicates whether the angles in the event are absolute. The abort() method for Application Cache has been added, as has a constructor for MediaStream accepting a collection of MediaStreamTracks. A window’s innerWidth and innerHeight properties won’t be affected by page scales anymore and drop and dragend events will now be issued for contentEditable elements.

Finally, the first significant patch in exposing the Shadow DOM to JavaScript has landed in WebKit! Minor as it is right now, it’ll pave the path to implementing the rest of the specification.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Hardware accelerated brightness and contrast filters have been implemented for Safari.
• IndexedDB has also been made supplemental and moved out of DOMWindow.cpp.
• Values of the Access-Control-Request-Headers header will now be send in lowercase.
• Another 0.8 MB of memory will be saved when viewing some random version of the HTML Specification.
• A special honorable mention for this immediately obvious commit message.
• Software-based 3D rendering can be disabled through about:flags now.
• Documentation of several Web Inspector-related Extension APIs is no longer experimental either.
• The experimental Settings Extension API now understands the unlimitedStorage permission as well.
• The headers and body of HTTP requests will now be merged if the total length is <1400 characters.
• The Network Action Predictor (chrome://network-action-predictor) now features probability filtering.

Finally, be sure to take a look at HTML5 Please, a new website sharing recommendations about which features of the Web Platform can be used today!

The experimental Sidebar Extension API has been removed from Chromium. The Downloads Extension API gained an getFileIcon method and now also works for POST-download requests, and Panels may now be resized and spawned without drawing attention using the chrome.windows API. chrome.experimental.dns made its entry.

Early steps in supporting IndexedDB in Web Inspector have been made and a “source” column has been added to the CSS Profiler, directly pointing out the offending CSS rule.
As part of an ongoing effort in WebKit, several failing tests on the IE Testcenter have been fixed. Among these are executing prepared scripts even when they’ve been removed from the DOM and sandboxed i-frames will now block the autofocus attribute if the sandbox flags request it.

WebKit now also supports getting the computed style for border-radius properties. Four compliance improvements have been made to JavaScriptCore, namely that defineOwnProperty is now available for arrays, changes around the length property for arrays, defineProperty and handling of colons in timezones. Finally, the navigator.startActivity method for Web Intents has been implemented, albeit behind a compile-time guard.

Following a specification change, the flex-align CSS property has been renamed to flex-item-align and a new version of flex-align has been implemented, and the implementation has been taught about handling absolutely positioned elements within flexboxes. Color matrix-based filters will now be done by Skia for Chromium, and the serpia tone filter has been aligned color-wise for Mac OS X. Text decorations won’t propagate to all descendants anymore and several more element types can now render outlines.

Two new CSS properties were implemented. The font-kerning property from the CSS Fonts specification will allow you to define kerning behavior, and the initial implementation of the font-variant-ligatures property will allow you to explicitly enable or disable OpenType’s common ligatures feature on a font.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• A basic content-shell has been added for Linux, part of the Content API refactoring.
• Another eight patches have been landed by Mike Lawther containing lots of new CSS3 calc() tests.
• Preparations are being made in the WebGL implementation to allow sharing resources.
• Calculating collapsed borders will now be done less often, resulting in a performance improvement.
• Injecting a stylesheet with only scoped selectors will now only invalidate the sub-tree.
• A JavaScript error-event will be emitted when a full-screen request has been rejected.
• Speech input will now be send to the right element, even if the focus has changed.
• Radio-button group selection will now only apply to the actual document they’re in.
• The WebIDL [Supplemental] IDL has been used to begin modularizing WebSQL.

Some interesting things currently going on include a Baidu contribution and basic grid alignment from the CSS Line Grid specification.

Engadget, among other sites, has become significantly faster in WebKit, now using 10% less CPU over the entire page load due to analyzing inline stylesheet scopes. A CSS Selector using multiple indirect adjacency combinators won’t be able to be superlinear anymore, inserting nodes into the DOM has been sped up and several other tweaks were implemented.

Sanitization of non-parsable strings in date and time input boxes is now possible in WebKit, emptying the value if an invalid value has occurred. The </script>-close tag will now be properly highlighted in View Source, and horizontal paddings and borders will be used instead of vertical ones for a CSS table’s fixed width.

Safari’s JavaScript engine aligned its behavior closer to the ECMAScript specification. The JSON object is now configurable, the parseInt method won’t parse octal numbers anymore, ThrowTypeError is now a singleton and date parsing has been made more liberal. Alexis Menard implemented getComputedStyle output for the outline, border, list-style, border-image and background properties. Finally, the Web Audio API is now able to integrate with audio and video elements throught the MediaElementAudioSourceNode object!

Eric Carlson implemented the temporal dimension portion of the Media Fragments URI specification. This allows you to append a formatted hash-string to any media file’s URL selecting which portion of the file should be played. For example, this plays the fourth until the twelfth second: video.webm#t=4,12.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Initial sets of layout tests for the CSS3 calc() function are being committed, pending the feature itself.
• Web Inspector now also allows you to modify HTML content through the Resources Panel.
• The WebKit build-bot console page now displays builders based on their port.
• The BlackBerry WebKit Port has enabled the download attribute.

And that’ll be all for now! Lets get back on the Monday-track for updates starting next week!

Besides support for true hardware acceleration, which pretty much is a requirement for features such as WebGL and CSS 3D Transforms, attention is also being given to software renderers. Several crashes for Apple’s OpenGL-software renderer have been fixed, and support for SwiftShader has been added for Windows installations, which will automatically be downloaded if support for GPU-based WebGL is blacklisted. While performance definitely won’t be en par with GPU-based WebGL, it’s a good solution for those on older systems.

The Web Inspector team landed some great new features, most notable of which is the CSS Selector Profiler. Available through the Profiles Panel in the Inspector, it will show the number of matches for a certain element and its contribution to the total style matching run-time. Two other new features, both displayed in the image below, are the ability to dock the Web Inspector to the right-side of the browser window (through the Settings window) and an experimental tabbed interface for the Script Panel.

New, experimental Web Inspector features will be hidden behind a command line flag and a setting. Tree views in side-bars cannot be collapsed anymore using the keyboard and subsequent @rule-statements in CSS will be highlighted. The ability to remove all breakpoints has been added, as has a cool Go To Function dialog. Finally, Web Inspector gained support for Source Mapping through the X-SourceMap HTTP header. When enabled (also through the Settings window), an Install Source Map context-menu item will be added to scripts in the Script Panel.

On Chromium’s side for Web Inspector, both the chrome.devtools and the chrome.debugger Extension APIs graduated from being experimental, so hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot of extensions starting with Chrome 18!

WebKit’s HTML5 parser has received a number of updates, which include support for the Noah’s Ark condition, 93 named entities which expand to more than a single character and some minor fixes related to NULL characters in HTML content. Video subtitles through the <track> element can now be rendered on a video, and subtitles will be enabled for WebKit-mac builds, meaning Safari. Finally, the dropzone attribute got aligned with the specification.

The XMLHttpRequest implementation has also been updated, which now compares the mime-types in a case insensitive way, gained support for the loadend event and allows more liberal modification of the withCredentials and responseType attributes. More excitingly, new response types (such as json) won’t support synchronous requests in a non-worker scope anymore. Two more init*Event methods have been removed, and retrieving the computed style of the border-style, border-color and margin properties has been implemented.

Default styling of the strong and b elements has been updated to be bold rather than bolder. CSS Filters may now be used on inline elements, the blur filter will now invalidate the entire element and animating brightness, contrast and drop-shadow filters won’t be reversed anymore, and two more issues with full CSS 2.1 support have been fixed.

Other changes which occurred during these weeks:

• Enabling the JavaScript ES.Next features (“Harmony”) in v8 is now possible through about:flags.
• Another feature which can now be enabled on about:flags are hardware accelerated CSS Filters.
• Chromium’s text rendering will now be done through Skia, instead of directly rendering with GDI.
• WebKit will now use 2.3 megabytes less memory when displaying the full HTML5 specification.
• Several HTML Collections will now be cached, also making reddit a whole lot more usable.
• The about:flags page will now show all experiments for all platforms (thanks, tbreisacher!)
• Panels on Chromium for Windows now have an overflow indicator count.
• A command line flag for experimental Web Inspector features has been added.
• As a next step in the content-API refactoring, work on WebContents has been started.
• Documentation for the WebRequest Extension API has been improved.

And that’s all again. Two bugs to keep an eye out for this week are updated patches for CSS calc()’s parsing and the beforeprint and afterprint events.

Going forth in improving security in the browser, Chromium will now display a fatal error when it encounters pages using SSL certificates signed with the MD2 and MD4 hashing algorithms, and will display an interstitial warning page for certificates signed with MD5. Certificates with RSA and DSA keys of less than 1024 keys will also be rejected.

Within Web Inspector, a sidebar has been added to the Script Panel displaying the included scripts on by their host. A large amount of internal properties of objects using the Detailed Heap Snapshot tool have been hidden and hex-colors with just three characters will now be highlighted.

As for specification related updates, Adam Barth made sure that six recent changes to the HTML5 parsing algorithm reflect in WebKit’s implementation. Clickable controls such as form fields may now be used as a <detail> element summary and cancelRequestAnimationFrame has been renamed to cancelAnimationFrame. Numbered lists can now be reversed using the reverse-attribute and XMLHttpRequest.responseXML now supports HTML documents.

A large amount of work has been done on the CSS Filter implementation. Filters are now animatable, they will affect visual overflow and several filters will now accept percentages as values. Finally, the implementation has been aligned with the specification and they can now be hardware accelerated, with an implementation for Apple’s Safari. Filters are now enabled for Chromium, and despite the security concerns, rendering CSS Shaders is now possible in WebKit builds which have the feature enabled!

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Information about changes to Extension APIs for Chrome 16 has been documented.
• Pausing, resuming and cancelling downloads are now possible through the Download API.
• Support for hardware-based video decoding has been implemented, only enabled on Chrome OS.
• The QtWebKit port now has support for the requestAnimationFrame API.
• New-lines in text-areas will now be counted as two characters for all platforms.
• The Chromium-API part of color input boxes has been implemented.
• Two more important performance improvements to the Web Audio API, contributed by Intel.
• A series of general clean-up and memory improvement patches from Andreas “printf” Kling.
• A significant memory improvement for Windows, sometimes yielding 5% improvement.
• Another 4% speed-up on Kraken for Apple’s new DFG JIT.
• Visited link hashes will now be cached, speeding up the total CPU usage on the HTML5 spec by 1%.

Since next Monday happens to be Boxing Day, I’ll publish a (probably brief) update the day after, Tuesday the 27th. Thank you for reading and have a Merry Christmas!

Chromium has reached a version number which equals a pentagonal pyramidal number: 18. In total, 7,107 Chromium commits, 4,198 WebKit commits and 526 v8 commits are included, totaling up to 11,831 changes for the Google Chrome 17 release, besides changes in other related projects such as Skia and NaCL.

Mutation Observers have been enabled for Chromium, which provide a much better alternative to DOM Mutation Events. Though still disabled by default, Chromium has been taught how to handle meta viewport elements, the scoped attribute for scoped stylesheets landed, table cells now understand widths in percentages and security around loading out-of-band text tracks has been improved by utilizing CORS.

WebKit now supports animations between background, border and list images utilizing the cross-fade() function which landed a few weeks ago. Parsing for multiple grid rows and columns has been added, as has parsing for the wrap and wrap-reverse values for the flex-flow property.

As a first step in being able to CSS Regions, background colors will now be applied. The behavior of !important in inline style sets has been aligned with the specification, automatic color adjustments for disabled input elements has been removed for Chromium and various more CSS 2.1 test failures have been fixed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The Screen, Terminal and VT100 classes, all part of an HTML-based terminal emulator, landed.
• A shutdown option has been added to Chromium OS’ wrench menu.
• Chromium Profile avatars will now be displayed in Windows profile-specific shortcuts.
• The three-step animation for panel minimizing is now also implemented for Linux.
• Safari using the WebKit2 API will stop the system and display from going to sleep mode.
• An initial implementation of accelerated compositing for WebKitGTK was committed, using Clutter.
• Web Inspector audits can now be stopped while they’re in-progress.
• Intel’s Xingnan Wang sped up the Web Audio API’s sample convolving by 70 percent.
• Support for a high-contrast mode for bubbles has been added.
• The aria-hidden attribute will now be working correctly for iframe elements.
• Support for Panels has been moved behind a flag again, except for Dev and Canary releases.
• The WebUI Task Manager is now enabled by default again, and will persist its window size.
• Work on GPU accelerated Filters has started in Chromium, behind the –enable-accelerated-filters flag.
• By adding a binding, CSS Filters can be used in Chromium by compiling with ENABLE_CSS_FILTERS=1.
• Moving the caret on Windows will now move in visual order rather than in logical order.
• Some performance pain-points for scrolling on YouTube have been addressed.
• Two recent Apple hires (NSFW) seem to have started with upstreaming parts of the iOS port.
• Yours truly is now a WebKit committer.

And that’ll be all for last week again. Things to keep an eye out for this week include custom written CSS Lexer and work by Simon Fraser to make the CSS Filter property animatable!

A few updates have been made to Chromium’s extension APIs, namely that the MHTML and webRequest APIs have been moved out of the experimental namespace, and a checkpoint commit for a new Socket API. While it’s not functional yet, it will eventually allow for extensions such as SSH and IRC clients to be made.

The visual appearance of Panels has been worked on quite a lot last week, with a visual refresh landing on Chromium for Mac OS X, together with a three-stage minimize animation. For Windows, the UI has been updated as well, and Panels can now also be drawn in iconified mode.

As for specification support, WebKit’s implementation of the bdo, bdi and output elements is now mostly aligned with the HTML5 specification. Limited parsing for the grid-columns and grid-rows properties has been implemented, CSS Filters will now render correctly on transformed elements and CSS Flexbox has been taught about reverse rows and columns. Images’ sources can be overwritten using the CSS content property now, and the correct focus rings for areas defined in an image’s image map will now be shown for zoomed pages.

The getMatchedCSSRules() method now knows how to handle pseudo-elements, SVG Gaussian blurs in a single dimension have been corrected, dragging the mouse out of :active elements will make it lose :hover as well and both range sliders and spin buttons have been fixed for usage in multiple columns.

To name a few improvements in accessibility support: multi-line selects on Windows will now expose the right states, tabs, menu and list items will receive mouse events and non-focusable nodes will no longer report to be focusable.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• More static initializers have been removed from the Chromium source.
• Chromium will now identify itself as another browser for two specific sites using Silverlight due to UA sniffing.
• Intel landed an SSE optimization for two math functions used for Web Audio API, doubling their performance.
• Chromium’s compositor is now able to use scissor-rect optimizations.
• Usage of “JavaScript” versus “Javascript” has been made consistent throughout Chromium.
• IndexedDB cursors will now be pre-fetched, yielding up two 2x performance improvement.
• The determination of whether HTTP pipelining is supported for a certain host has been made more careful.
• Apple’s JavaScriptCore can now JIT integral arrays, and now features optimized string equality checks.
• WebKit’s WebIDL’s implementation has been taught about static methods.
• Style sharing has been optimized by Antti Koivisto; 20% less style memory and +25% matching performance.
• Apple seems to be working on bringing Web Notification support to Safari.
• Alejandro G. Castro is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
• A patch by Mark Pilgrim appears.

This week I expect Chromium to reach version 18, lots of additional BlackBerry upstreaming and more work on scoped stylesheets. That’ll be all again!

Quite some housekeeping has been done in Chromium’s extension APIs: the clipboard API has been removed in favor of document.execCommand, the Settings API has been renamed to the Storage API and notifications were added for screen wake-ups and unlocks. Also new is the ability to change a window’s state.

In light of the recent commit milestones Chromium and WebKit hit, it’s noteworthy to add that v8 reached revision 10,000 last week. Performance of switches using string clauses has been improved and preliminary detection for ES.next’s extended mode has been added, which basically reflects strict mode with some added functionality.

Another two CSS 2.1 conformance errors were fixed, the CSS Exclusions implementation has been aligned with the specification and the wrap property will now be parsed. A crash with filters was fixed, and the first step towards being able to use CSS Transforms on SVG elements also landed last week.

WebKit’s side of supporting game controllers was landed by Scott Graham, together with the first part of the Chromium-side implementation. It may be tested using the –enable-gamepad command line flag, or via about:flags. The addCue and removeCue methods for subtitles are now supported, and the HTML5 dirname and Microdata properties attributes are now supported.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Installing Google Chrome Frame on Windows Vista RTM’s stock Internet Explorer 7 is now possible.
• Another good step for the GStreamer-based Web Audio API implementation: audio destinations.
• A low-entropy, shared secret authentication protocol called P224 was added to Chromium.
• Page zoom factors have been normalized to produce more user-friendly zoom percentages and limitations.
• The ability to create desktop shortcuts for Chrome Profiles has been implemented for Windows.
• The first part of the <meta name=referrer> implementation has landed in Chromium.
• WebGL has been enabled by default for the WebKitGTK port!
• Chromium’s embedding code for GetUserMedia has been implemented in WebKit, another step closer.
• The WebKit-side of supporting asynchronous spell-checking landed last week.
• Usability of Web Inspector’s auto-complete suggestion box has been improved.
• Some test-cases have been added for the Pointer Lock API at WebKit.

And that’s it again. Interesting changes for the upcoming week include the NamedFlow JavaScript interface for CSS Regions and stack traces for cross-origin access errors within Web Inspector.

Within Chromium, the new History UI has been launched and can be seen on chrome://history. Content Security Policy will be enabled for all extensions using a (newly introduced) manifest version of two or higher and improved download protection has now been enabled by default, assuming you have Safe Browsing enabled.

Right clicking on function values in Web Inspector will now give you the ability to browse to it’s definition. The font property in the styles pane will now show up as a proper shorthand property, selected items in context menus have been given a slight gradient and messages from the front-end to the back-end are now asynchronous.

Timothy Horton landed support for the CSS4 Images cross-fade() function. Though not fully implemented yet, it can be used as a value for any property that expects an image, such as background-image, and will render a cross faded combination of the two given images or gradients. Examples working in nightlies can be found here.

The new CSS3 Flexible Box implementation in WebKit has been enabled by default. While new features and enhancements are still incoming, it is a lot more performant and aligns WebKit better with the spec. Ojan, Tony and Julien have started working on implementing CSS Grid Layout, some patches for which have already landed.

Another new feature which landed today is support for <meta name=”referrer”>. By specifying the referrer policy in the content attribute, which can be one of never (don’t include a referrer header on navigation), always (which includes cross-protocol requests), origin (just send the page’s origin) and default, you can anonymize any request.

As for improved specification support, another CSS 2.1 test was fixed last week. The document.width and document.height properties have been removed, as has the initProgressEvent method, and access keys now work on all elements. JavaScriptCore’s implementation of Error.prototype.toString is now ES5 conformant, adding invalid track formats will throw an exception and the report-only mode for Content Security Policy has been fixed.

Most CSS Filters now work in WebKit nightlies, which includes grayscale, serpia, invert, hue rotating, saturating, opacity, gamma, drop shadow and blurring effects. Meanwhile, computed styles for CSS Shaders have been implemented as well. For CSS Exclusions, the wrap-margin, wrap-padding, wrap-flow and wrap-through properties are now being parsed, indicating good progress.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• A low-latency audio channel has been implemented in Chrome for Windows, based on the WASAPI.
• The WebKit Build bot previously used to test Flexible Box will now be testing the CSS Grid Layout progress.
• Infrastructure for the BlackBerry WebKit build system is being upstreamed to the project.
• Pages should no longer flash when switching to GPU Accelerated rendering, for example due to transitions.
• An experimental WebGL extension has been implemented adding support for compressed textures.
• Two more performance improvements for the DFG JIT: 1% due to improved speculation, and 1% due to calls.
• Eight bit strings have been enabled for WTF’s StringImpl and JavaScriptCore.
• Tab changes in Chromium for Linux are now about 15 millisecond faster.
• Client-level Chrome installs can now update themselves even if a system-level Chrome has been installed.
• Stack Exchange is now listed in all of Chrome’s Extension Documentation as a support channel.
• Machine names will now also be listed on the about:sessions page for Tab Synchronization.
• Color-filter optimizations have been enabled in Skia, delivering significant speedups for sites using shadows.
• Exceptions for permissions given to the Full Screen API can now be managed through Chromium’s options.
• The Bookmark All Tabs dialog has been re-implemented using WebUI.
• Thanks to Nico Weber, another 59 static initializers and 116 exit-time destructors have been removed.
• Through 16 commits similar to this one, Avi Drissman has been adding OVERRIDE keywords.
• The new experimental Speech Input API was announced, including an example.

Work to keep an eye out for this week are related to Web Intents. That’ll be all!