While the release managers were busy with the release of Chrome 7, the rest of the developers checked in another 635 changes. Meanwhile, over at WebKit, 498 more changes contributed to another busy week.

As part of the ongoing effort on making the Web Inspector tools as convenient as possible, Pavel Feldman continued work on merging the Storage and the Resources panels. The new panel contains both the storage items as the resources used to build the current page, combined in a clear tree view. Meanwhile, the Network panel UI has been polished a bit, which hopefully brings it a bit closer to being released.

Google’s Ben Murdoch added support for two new methods on the Document object: document.createTouch and document.createTouchList. Until now, these two properties were only available for the iPhone browser, but since other WebKit-based mobile browsers are gaining strongly in popularity, as well as the fact that many websites use them to check for touch-support, it made sense to add them to the document object.

No, it did not open Anne van Kesteren’s website in some ancient proprietary browser, this actually happened in the latest Chromium build. A subject I have deliberately not mentioned in my posts is Dave Hyatt’s amazing work on supporting the text and block-flow defined in the CSS3 Writing Modes module. Last Thursday a patch landed adding the possibility to have vertical text on your pages.

While there’s still a lot of work to do before the implementation will be finished, you can play around with it by downloading a Chromium build and using the “-webkit-writing-mode” property with the “vertical-rl” value. The feature has been available in Internet Explorer since version seven as well.

In terms of improved standard support, WebKit’s document.write now ignores calls from delayed scripts (r5616 of the HTML5 spec). The “in select”-mode has been added to the HTML parser and the “in foreign content”-mode has been rewritten. The rich-editing RemoveFormat command has been rewritten as well.

Other changes last week include:

• Some fine-tuning work on the ES5 Strict mode implementation for JavaScriptCore.
• Support for the WebP image format landed in WebKit, not yet enabled for any port.
• Support for preload=none on media elements has been added for Safari on Windows.
• Mipmapping has been disabled for Chromium due to memory and performance reasons.
• JavaScript engines will now be informed of the column position of a script.
• CSS Transforms will now be taken into account when determining scrollbars for a page.
• Chromium on Mac-systems will now be using WebKit’s own image decoders.
• After 5.1 surround sound, Chromium will now also support 8-channel-sources (7.1).
• WebGL and Accelerated Compositing have been disabled by default for Google Chrome 8.
• Password synchronization has been enabled by default.
• The Web Inspector Storage Panel has been updated with errors, warnings and search.
• The File API has been updated with the latest specification changes, mostly related to error codes.

I’m hoping to publish a blog post about the CSS writing modes in the next week, as there certainly are a lot of interesting things to talk about. And, of course, another last week update in about seven days!