Revision 60.000, first bits of the URL API and pingin’ the anchor

Published on September 27th, 2010 in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 7

With the addition of another 552 commits in the last week, Chromium has breached the milestone of sixty thousand commits! In comparison, revision 60.000 landed in WebKit exactly four months ago. WebKit gained the contents of 539 commits last week, done by about a hundred different authors.

Support for the ping attribute on anchors (<a ping>) has been added in WebKit four days ago, following Firefox who had an implementation about four years ago. There are various ways to do this already, overriding the click-event and send out a ping using XHR, for example. The feature is still disabled by default, although a command line flag might be added in the near feature.

One of the things Adam Barth is currently working on is an URL API. Citing it, the API can be used for constructing, parsing and resolving URLs through scripting, easening up tasks like getting and setting parameters. Today the first part landed in WebKit, which added the “origin” property.

Google Code has added support for browsing the WebKit, Chromium and V8 repositories!
Linux support for launch-on-startup has been added to Chromium.
Accelerated Compositing won’t be enabled anymore for built-in pages and extensions.
An about:gpuhang page has been added, locking the GPU Process for debugging purposes.
Safe browsing’s database has become a lot faster now that SafeBrowsingStoreFile is enabled.
The images for match preview tearing and the speech input elements have received some love.
Some more accessibility improvements in Chromium, following a series of WebKit changes.
Remoting is now listed in about:labs. The login-dialog still fails for me, though.
Support for Google Push Notifications has been added to Chromium’s libjingle.
Some more tests have been added to ensure the entity handling in WebKit follows HTML5.
The SVG Filters in WebKit have been moved, as they’re becoming independent of SVG.
Dave Hyatt has started working on supporting the block-flow property.
Keyboard support has been added for <input type=range>.
Chromium’s implementation of FileWriter has landed in WebKit.
WebKit used to crash when a font-size with “ex” units was given for canvasses, this has been fixed.

I’ve got quite some plans for the post next week, as I realize this one is lacking some graphical love. Until then, don’t forget that there’s an RSS Feed available for updates to Chromium’s command line flags, which could certainly give you a nice indication of what the team’s been working on!

Thanks to Ms2ger for a correction: Mozilla did not disable the ping attribute by default due to privacy concerns, but rather because the specification changed shortly before the Firefox 3 release.

5 Responses to “Revision 60.000, first bits of the URL API and pingin’ the anchor”

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

What makes you think that Mozilla thinks ping will hurt privacy? Yes, there’s random trolls who don’t understand the feature, but those are in all public bug trackers. Note that ping is disabled in Gecko because the specification changed under it right before the Fx3 release.

You’re right. I dug in to it a little bit further and came across an article by Darin Fisher, which cleared up a lot. I’ll revise my post, thank you!

Hi, I just discovered your blog. What a fantastic resource for keeping up to date with Chromium/Webkit development! Thanks a lot!

Hey Peter,

I just wanted to let you know I think your blog entries are pretty rad. Reminds me a bit of the Firefox “Burning Edge” posts, but with a little more explanation/discussion. Keep it up.

–pkasting, Chromium UI guy

Peter, very informative post, as always. Keep up the great work!