Another busy week has passed with 579 commits in the WebKit repository, and 683 in Chromium’s. Next to large amounts of on-going work on supporting the writing modes through CSS and great progress on the Web Audio implementation, a lot of other components have been improved or enhanced again.

Quite some work has been put into image support in both WebKit and Chromium. About three months after the idea first arose, the libjpeg-turbo library has landed in Chromium’s repository. As the name suggests, it’s basically a fast, optimized library to display JPEG images.

Furthermore, another image-related subject which is being worked on is enabling ICC Color Profiles for the open source image decoders in WebKit. Previously color profiles were supported on Mac OS X, through the CoreGraphics framework, but because Chromium on Mac has now switched to the open source decoders, it’s a temporary regression.

While most of the work on color profiles still seems to be focused on Mac OS X and, right now, on JPEG and PNG files, it’s a good sign that progress is being made. It might even open up the path for supporting color profiles on Windows and Linux. With larger resolutions, additional image formats and rendering on the GPU through accelerated compositing, it’ll be interesting to see where it’ll be going.

I’ve talked about two larger changes in Web Inspector in the past few weeks: the new Network Panel and the merge of the Resources and Storage panels. Earlier today, Pavel Feldman activated both changes, allowing them to land in recent Chromium builds. There still are bugs, and lots of fine-tuning, enhancements and moving things around, but it’s accessible and ready to be experimented with!

In preparation of support for the HTML5 <output> element, a new interface called DOMSettableTokenList has been implemented. Jeremy Orlow has added a very well documented test-case/tutorial for the IndexedDB database, handling of the optimum-parameter for <meter> has been adjusted and the File Reader object now supports the “readAsArrayBuffer” method.

More changes which occurred in the last week:

• Chromium on the Mac OS X operating system will now actually use WebKit’s image decoders.
• The File System API has now been integrated with Web Inspector, but isn’t visible yet.
• New images for scrollbars on Chromium OS have been committed.
• Dynamically inserted animated GIF images which don’t define a loop count will now only animate once.
• The “seeked” event will be invoked when seeking for very small increments on media elements.
• Resuming CSS Animations won’t invoke the “animationstart” event anymore.
• The <input type=number> element will now be using single-precision IEEE 754 floats.
• Quotas for IndexedDB databases are now calculated per origin, and no longer per database.
• The “grammar” attribute for Google’s speech input has been added, named “x-webkit-grammar”.
• The Google Chrome Extensions documentation site will soon be getting some additional love.
• Notifications may now be 160 pixels tall, forty pixels more compared to the old limit.
• The “Hyphen” library from the Hunspell project has been added to the project.

To all the people at TPAC: have a great week, I wish I could be there 🙂 If you want to stay informed about CSS proposals such as “drinking-mode“, read about the clothing guidelines and other interesting updates, keep an eye out for the #tpac hashtag on Twitter.

Update

I’ve revised the post following comments from Nico and Peter Kasting. WebKit (and Chromium) on Mac OS X already supported image color-profiles through the CoreGraphics libraries, and switching to the open source decoders created a temporary regression in the support. According to this comment, WebKit on Mac OS X already supported JPEG 2000, but that’s no longer the casenow that it doesn’t use the CoreGraphics library anymore.