Exactly 625 days after the release of the first stable version, the Google Chrome browser has hit an important milestone: over 10% of the internet users -about 197 million people- use Chrome as their browser. That equals about 315 thousand new users every day, which is rather mind blowing if you ask me. Being well aware of this, the Chromium and WebKit teams were responsible for another 1.137 commits in the last week!

The sixth major version of Google Chrome has been released as a stable version, bringing support for tons of new features and better performance and stability. Furthermore, for a brief moment it looked like Chromium would be getting an auto-updater. While this is something people have been asking for ever since the first Chromium builds were released, it looks like Google Canary will remain to be closest to that idea.

Hardware Acceleration already has been available in WebKit for a few months, but work continues to optimize performance. Now that 2D Canvasses may be accelerated too, work has been started on adding tessellation following Loop and Blinn’s algorithm. While this has caused quite some discussion, the first parts, including the polygon tessellator from OpenGL, have already landed. More details on the implementation being used are available as well.

As for new HTML and CSS related features, Tony Gentilcore added support for delayed script execution using the defer attribute. Furthermore, percentages may now be used as values for the border-radius CSS property. The used radius will be equal to the given percentage of the width or height of it’s border-box.

• Video elements no longer automatically loop after playback has completed.
• Enabling accelerated compositing in Chromium won’t make your scrollbar blue anymore.
• Synchronous File Reader operations may now be used in Web Workers.
• Clicking on a WebKit Notification now fires a click event.
• The implementation of the Audio API in WebKit is being moved to the main development branch.
• Scripts have been added to generate ADMX and ADML files for enterprise policies.
• Chrome’s ready to run an entirely sandboxed (thus safe!) instance of Adobe Flash.
• The experimental sidebar view (and API) is now available for Mac OS X users as well.
• Text on the badge of an extension has a decent font size again (or too big this time?)
• Audio Recording for speech input fields is now available for Linux as well, via ALSA.
• The V8 JavaScript engine has reached version 2.4: various bugfixes and performance improvements.

A bit technical this week, I realize that 🙂 For this week it looks like accelerated compositing and 3D CSS will be enabled by default and work on full-screen video could come closer to being finished. With Firefox implementing 3D CSS as well, I’m curious about the demos which surely could be arriving soon now.