With the commit count being up 52 percent compared to last week, totaling 1,184 commits, activity has been a lot higher than two weeks ago. Highlights include Google Chrome 8, tomorrow’s announcement and lots of updates to standard support.

Exactly six weeks and over 8,472 commits after the release of Google Chrome 7, Google has updated the Stable channel to the 8th version of their browser. This release brings support for Element.classList, asynchronous script loading, support for the steps timing-function for transitions, the about:flags page and hyperlink auditing, enabled by default.

As a quick peek-ahead towards a feature for Google Chrome that’s currently scheduled for version 9, which would be around mid January: Google Cloud Printing. The idea is simple: connect your printer with GCP and you’ll be able to print to it from any computer or smart phone, regardless of where you are. Probably unrelated: an event will be happening in San Francisco tomorrow morning sharing some exciting news about Google Chrome. While I have a fair idea what it will be about, there is little point in more speculation.

WebKit has taken a huge leap forward in terms of support for various standards. ArrayBuffers may now be transmitted using XMLHttpRequest’s send-method, a form’s elements property now includes fieldset and keygen elements, getBoundingClientRect won’t truncate the coordinates to integers anymore and focussed <area> elements will no longer use the image’s focus-styles.

An <input type=color> will no longer accept named colors and the incremental property is now available on the DOM of all input elements. The toDataURL method of a canvas’ context in Chromium can now export the image as a JPEG, the marquee element’s properties have been updated per the HTML5 specification (besides the events) and, while they don’t have visual effects yet, support for the four text-emphasis properties from the CSS3 Text module was added.

Finally, support for both lower and upper Armenian list style types has been implemented and initial versions of the HTML5 <details> and <summary> elements have been added by Luiz Agostini. Even though they aren’t interactive yet, work has started!

Other interesting changes which occurred last week:

• Option elements will not be bold anymore for certain Chromium versions.
• The about:flags page will now show a drop-down for items where multiple values are possible.
• Hyperlink auditing (<a ping>) may now be disabled via the about:flags page.
• Two games have been made the default Apps: Entanglement and Poppit.
• A command line flag for accelerated layers is now available, from about:flags as well.
• data URLs within Chromium can now trigger downloads as well.
• The GTK WebKit port finished the implementation of the MSAA ROLE_COMBO_BOX.
• Pausing and resuming downloads now works for the WebKit2 architecture.
• A tab overflow problem with right-to-left text has been solved.
• The behavior of the decreasing outer-spin-button has been revised.
• The \s modifier for the YARR Regular Expression Engine now also matches BOMs.
• Safari on Mac OS X will be getting a panel for multiple suggestions for misspelled words.
• Intel’s Yuqiang Xian eliminated a large overhead for a certain way of writing to a canvas.
• The Qt port has enabled support for the Web Timing implementation.
• More fine-tuning for Chromium OS’ User Interface.
• Four more commits by Chris Rogers for the Web Audio API implementation.

No, of course I didn’t forget Web Inspector. The “revert to revision” system has been implemented for the revision-system in the Resources panel. The display name of an object will now equal its constructor rather than its type, copy(node) in the Console works again, the cookies tab for a Network resource will only show for Chromium, and, finally, the Inspector protocol has been cleaned up.

As already mentioned earlier in the post, the Google Chrome team scheduled an announcement for tomorrow. Be sure to keep an eye out for news and updates, I’ll certainly devote some tweets to the announcement!