Another week passed, bringing a total of 1,350 change-sets to Chromium (796 commits) and WebKit (554 commits). Highlights include a new logo for Chromium, selecting multiple tabs, an Animation API, CSS’ new text-orientation property and an improved pale-violet-red color.

Scott Violet landed the first functional part of a new feature: multiple tab selection. Instead of being able to select just one tab, multiple tabs can be selected by using <shift>+click or <ctrl>+click. While the feature still needs work, including proper rendering of multiple tabs and a better dragging thumbnail, it’s already available for you to check out in nightlies: just launch Chromium with “--enable-multi-tab-selection“.

Another change for Chromium’s tab bar is that adjoined tabs sharing a common title prefix, such as “Chromium Blog”, will have their titles elided. This means that the shown title will be more relevant and that it will be easier to find the tab you’re looking for. Right now it’s only available for Chromium builds on Windows, but support for the other platforms is in the works.

Dean Jackson landed the first part of an API for managing animations which apply to a certain element. The API is available in both Chromium and WebKit nightlies and adds a new method to DOM HTML Elements: webkitGetAnimations. It returns an AnimationList which contains the active animations, as Animation objects. As is visible here, it provides access to most common settings for CSS-based animations. While the play() and pause() methods are being exposed, they’ll start functioning after an upcoming patch lands.

As for new features, an initial part of HTML5’s DataTransferItem and DataTransferItems interfaces landed, together with a partial implementation for Chromium. Dave Hyatt implemented the text-orientation property from the CSS3 Writing Modes module, although it hasn’t been implemented for Windows yet. Luiz Agostini landed the rendering part for the <details> and <summary> implementations.

In the effort to improve standard compliance, several commits addressed failures in the CSS 2.1 test-suite. Several issues with the ex unit have been solved, parsing for background position components has been rewritten and the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements may now be used on table rows. Furthermore, the values of the named “palevioletred” and “mediumpurple” colors have been fixed.

One not so significant, yet certainly interesting change, is the inclusion of the jQuery test-suite in the WebKit tree. Widely used as the library is, it’s a good thing to see that both parties will test on each other’s software to ensure full compatibility.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Chromium received a new logo, quite different from the previous one.
• A minor change in preparation of Chromium’s registerProtocolHandler implementation.
• Moving nodes across different documents in the DOM is now possible for certain methods.
• JavaScriptCore fixed three issues with the RegExp prototype, improving conformance with ES5.
• Through a minor Accept-header change, WebKit now properly indicates to prefer HTML over XML.
• Safari on Mac OS X Lion will be able to use the AV Foundation framework for media playback.
• Soft hyphens will now always be correctly rendered when a linebreak occurs.
• A lookup-based approach for applying CSS properties has been introduced.
• Warnings and errors for invalid viewport values are accurate again.
• Following the announcement, Gears has been removed from the codebase. Thanks, @temp_01!
• WebKit’s HTML parser will now yield for layout before running scripts, improving first-paint time.
• Web Inspectors breakpoint sidebar-pane has been re-implemented in a more common format.
• The prerender experiment will now be enabled for about 5% of the Chromium users.
• Welcoming Google Chrome 12. Too bad about the same message was used for Chrome 11!
• Search-box extensions may now choose how auto-complete should show: normal, delayed or never.
• UDP sockets have been implemented for Windows, presumably for Chromium’s P2P API.
• Chrome will be removing all languages except for English, with Scott Hess liaising for proper user support.

All the best to the people in Japan, I truly hope things will start getting better as soon as possible. Good luck!