With just 347 commits at WebKit, and 433 at Chromium, activity indeed has been down a bit. Nevertheless, there have been some interesting changes, including spatialization resources and Strict Mode fixes for Safari.

Matrices have been given some love within WebKit, with two more methods for the CSSMatrix class: skewX and skewY. Both normal 2D matrices and 3D matrices will now take the page’s zoom factor in account, and some additional tests have been added to ensure that behavior on CSSMatrix as well.

Specification support has been given quite some attention again. JavaScriptCore, the JavaScript engine used by Safari, no longer allows you to delete variables, functions or arguments per ECMAScript 5’s Strict Mode. Defining multiple font families for a CSS @font-face rule will discard the rule. The box-shadow property no longer requires a prefix, although -webkit-box-shadow remains available for non-standard blur radiuses.

Within Web Inspector, work is well on its way to support auto-completion for a property’s values. There still are some patches which need to be updated before the feature can be implemented, but the forecast is rather good. Meanwhile, Chris Rogers added spatialization resource files for the Web Audio API and landed an AudioBus for Chromium, bringing wider support for the API a step closer.

Other changes last week include:

• Borders with non-opaque alpha colors won’t break gradients anymore for Chromium.
• Support for listening sockets was added for Chromium, used for Cloud Print, Remoting and Automation.
• Five new commands have been implemented in Chromium’s Web Driver, for tracking a page’s elements.
• V8’s implementation of window.open has been moved to WebKit’s common one.
• The initial state for HTML5’s interactive validation on <select required> elements has been fixed.
• Rendering and script execution won’t block anymore on deferred stylesheets.
• Ryosuke Niwa has joined WebKit’s reviewers team, congratulations!
• Chromium’s timeline in media controls can now deal with widths less than 240 pixels.
• The performance of Chromium’s toDataURL for canvasses has been improved by 3 times.
• The root layer of a composited page will now be tiled as well.
• Some major directory reorganization work is underway within WebKit: don’t get lost!

Considering this year only counts four more days, I don’t think this week will bring much surprises, even though there are some interesting patches pending. Have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy New Year!