Well over 200 developers added value to the Chromium and WebKit projects last week, delivering a combined total of 1018 patches to the repositories. Different from a week ago, there weren’t any huge noticeable changes this week. Most work was part of larger projects or stability and performance improvements.

Still, there have been a few updates related to standard support. The document.lastModified property was updated according to HTML5 last Tuesday, the Canvas Context will now parse system colors and work on supporting the “block-flow” and “writing-mode” CSS properties seems to have been started.

More work has been completed last week on Google’s effort to move the options dialogs to webpages. You can enable the tabbed options page yourself by supplying the --enable-tabbed-options flag to Chrome or going to the about:labs page if you’re running Google Canary or Chromium. Furthermore, information and screenshots about the new History UI are available as well. Check out issue 52697 and the new designs.

Are you one of the poor folks working at a company which uses Internet Explorer as their primary browser, as well as (group) policies to severely limit your freedom? Good news! In the future you might be using Google Chrome with (group) policies which severely limit your freedom! The team seems to be gearing up in order to make their browser more interesting for larger organizations, as can be seen on the Documentation for Administrators page on the Chromium website, including quick-start guides for Windows, Apple and Linux.

Other changes in Chromium and WebKit last week:

• Behavior of the viewport meta-tag algorithm has been updated for WebKit’s Qt port.
• Following heated discussion, the <sarcasm> element has been removed.
• CSS Rules with all their properties disabled will now show up again in Web Inspector.
• Chromium will now be informed of WebKit’s Accessibility Notifications.
• Thumbnails can now be generated for pages which will be rendered by the GPU.
• The property document.compatMode is now available for XHTML files.
• Drawing an image outside the boundaries of a Canvas Element won’t cause a repaint anymore.
• The index support for IndexedDB has been finished, including some Chromium plumbing.
• Columns will now be split at layout time rather than at paint time, fixing rendering issues.
• The minimum DOM Timer interval for Safari has been decreased to 4ms.
• More work has been completed on password synchronization for Chrome.

And that’s it for this week! Keep in mind, if you’d like to see people like Brendan Eich, Steve Faulkner, Christian Heilmann, Paul Irish and Jeremy Keith speaking about the web, there’s only a few tickets left for Fronteers 2010. The conference will take place on the 7th and 8th of October in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Finally, a big Thank You to Steve Souders and Juriy Zaytsev for commenting on the <script> loading graph!