Following the relatively low count of 1,097 changes two weeks ago, last week introduced a combined total of 1,945 changes, 1,186 at Chromium and 759 at WebKit. While many of these changes were part of the rush for features to make it into Google Chrome 17 (which will be branched tomorrow), highlights include two important new features for the Flexbox implementation and a Socket API.
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:
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!
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Thanksgiving made last week a short week for people living in the United States, and as such only 1,079 changes landed to the Chromium and WebKit repositories. Highlights include a number of extension API updates, work on supporting game controllers and WebGL for the WebKitGTK port.
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:
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.
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Last week was the busiest week so far for both projects, totaling up to 1,745 changes — 794 for WebKit, and 951 for Chromium. Highlights include CSS Cross Fading, Flexible Box, Filters and <meta name=referrer>.
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:
Work to keep an eye out for this week are related to Web Intents. That’ll be all!
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With another 1,616 commits down the pipeline, 904 at Chromium’s and 712 as WebKit’s, another very busy week has passed. The highlights include a first working CSS Filter, the hundred-thousandth commit for WebKit and the ability to change your user agent in Web Inspector.
A large number of changes by Nico Weber removed a significant amount of static initializers and exit-time destructors, which will improve Chromium’s overall performance during start-up and shut-down.
Web Inspector now shows the media queries which are associated with certain CSS Rules. The user agent with which a page gets loaded may now be changed, selected text in a Script panel received an extra context menu option to evaluate it directly in the console and a suggestion box will now be shown for both CSS as JavaScript properties. Finally, the indentation of pretty-printed JavaScript can now be configured.
Dean Jackson added code to WebKit’s CSS Parser, making it understand the syntax for drop shadows. Meanwhile, the first part of parsing the custom() filter definition, used for CSS Filters, landed as well. Support for parsing the line-grid-snap property has been added as well, which will allow snapping of text towards the nearest enclosing grid.
The sandbox attribute for iframes won’t accept vertical tabs as separators anymore, the IndexedDB implementation gained support for compound keys and the textTracks attribute for media elements has been added, supposing your port of choice enables subtitles. The importNode will now do a deep copy by default, zooming of SVG images in <object> elements has stabilized and IDL files have landed describing the Mouse Lock API.
For WebKit ports who have CSS Filters enabled, the hue-rotate() filter started working per Dean’s plumbing of filter effects through the rendering code. Small as it is, it’s enough to be excited about :).
Other changes which occurred last week:
And that’ll be all again!
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Last week, 1,332 changes landed in both repositories: 768 at Chromium’s and 564 at WebKit. Highlights include the possibility to print background images and colors, a vastly improved GC for Apple’s JavaScriptCore and quite some updates on Content Security Policy following last week’s TPAC.
A multi-threaded accelerated surface implementation has landed now for Chromium on Windows as well, which, together with a follow up patch, will aid in having multiple windows rendering at 60 frames per second.
Following discussion at last week’s TPAC, WebKit’s Content Security Policy implementation has been updated to handle empty URLs, the allow-popups directive has been implemented on request of Microsoft, as has the sandbox directive, which basically mirrors the “sandbox” attribute for html and iframe elements.
In terms of specification compliance, the CSS Parser has been adjusted to accept any character in a string except for newlines and the string-opening quote. Finally, window.onerror will now fire for exceptions and errors in attribute-scripts. Canvas objects can now be exported to WebP images and using a border-box box-sizing with elements that have display on table-cell won’t calculate the content height anymore.
For subtitles, a TrackEvent was added, as were load notifications. WebKit now supports the -webkit-print-color-adjust property which allows you to toggle printing of background images and colors, and Fady Samuel landed the parsing stage of a new -webkit-aspect-ratio property, specified on Tab’s blog.
In the past few weeks, a lot of performance improvements already landed for Apple’s JavaScriptCore, followed this week by another 3.8% on Kraken and 3.5% on v8. The latter is especially interesting, as it adds parallel tracing to the garbage collector, reducing GC pauses by almost 50% in day-to-day usage!
A compile time flag has been added for CSS Shaders, indicating that work there will be starting! A fair number of bugs has already been created, which are being worked on together by Adobe and Apple engineers.
Other changes which occurred last week:
And that’ll be all again 🙂
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Another 1,511 changes further on, 885 made at Chromium’s repository and 626 at WebKit’s. Last week’s highlights include upstreaming of OpenBSD support into Chromium, lots of progress on implementing support for HTML5 Microdata and first steps towards supporting the CSS cross-fade() function for images.
At Chromium, a series of patches has been contributed by Robert Nagy which strongly improve support for the OpenBSD operating system. Previously it was maintained as a port on OpenBSD Ports.
Within Web Inspector, it’s now possible to select the indentation which will be used in the text editors. The four options available are two, four or eight spaces, or a tab. Advanced search is now available for content scripts and inline background-image CSS properties won’t show a warning anymore in the console.
Arko Saha’s work on implementing the HTML5 Microdata properties and DOM API is progressing nicely, as the itemprop, itemref and itemvalue properties landed last week. The itemtype attribute has been enhanced to accept a space-separated list of values, and code for the itemid attribute is just about to land as well.
As for specification related improvements, drawing images on a canvas by using certain composition modes has been fixed. Input step-values may now start with dots, IndexedDB has been taught the deleteDatabase method and two patches landed implementing parts of the Mutation Observers specification.
Support for argument-less functions has been added, in preparation of the greyscale CSS filter and column progression is now independent of writing mode. Automatic sizing of flexbox has been fixed, setting visibility: hidden on video elements on Safari now works properly and three more CSS 2.1 test-failures have been fixed, which includes proper support for intrinsic background sizes.
Parsing of two new CSS features has landed, namely for line-grid and for the cross-fade() function. The former is a shorthand for line-grid-mode and line-grid-progression defined in the CSS Text Module, whereas the latter allows cross fading images and is defined in CSS Image Values Level 4.
Other changes which occurred last week:
In other news, Andy Wingo published an excellent article about the new DFG JIT Apple is implementing in JavaScriptCore. Picks for the this week are notifications for the GTK port and four new media pseudo-classes.
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With 974 changes to Chromium’s repository, and 637 at WebKit’s, last week totaled up at 1,611 commits. Highlights are the new Chromium version, work on the Mouse Locking API and more work on Regions.
Chromium has reached version 17. The number, which also happens to be a repunit prime when written in base-16, supersedes the now branched Chrome 16. There are about 5,500 Chromium revisions going in the 16th major.
Vincent Scheibb has been working on a Mouse Locking API, the back-end for the settings of which landed in Chromium last week. Meanwhile, the WebKit side of the implementation is also starting, with the ability to toggle the feature either at compile or run-time.
As for Web Inspector, it now supports case sensitive searches and has support for regular expressions for the advanced search features and searches will now display their progress again. An element’s dimensions will now be displayed clearer with it’s highlight on the page.
As for specification support, the -webkit-from-flow value for the content property has been changed into its own property: -webkit-from-flow. Furthermore, the @-webkit-region at-rule can now be parsed, support for XPath is now enabled for all ports and the new Flexible Box Module implementation can now handle column flows.
Rendering of certain column-rule styles in vertical writing modes has been fixed, the ArrayBuffer object now supports the slice method, IDL files for the <track>-element have been added and content can now be clipped to variable width regions. Column rules will now be positioned correctly in vertical layouts when horizontal borders or paddings apply. Two patches have been committed in relation to the new Mutation Observers API as well.
Other changes which occurred last week:
That’d be all again. For the upcoming week, keep an eye out for work on the CSS aspect-ratio property and the Page Visibility API for the EFL port.
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