1,403 new patches have been introduced to the Chromium and WebKit repositories in the last week, among which were results of the WebKit BiDi-sprint, free-flow CSS editing and SMS notifications for Chromium OS.

More work has been done on the multiple-profile implementation for Chromium, resulting in visual results for Mac users now as well. The button is quite different from the early mock-ups shown in November, but definitely looks neat and uses less space than the original version.

Quite some patches were submitted to WebKit as part of the announced BiDi-sprint. The <title>-element now supports the dir attribute, moving the caret by word will now occur in visual order when editing text and BiDi-rendering for SVG Text has been improved. Furthermore, the text-align CSS property can now handle match-parent and the values isolate and plaintext can now be parsed for the unicode-bidi property, all prefixed.

Web Inspector now supports free-flow text editing for CSS files! This is a major usability improvement, as it means that making larger modification will be a lot easier. The feature is already available in Google Canary and Chromium nightlies. Just go to the Resources Panel, select a CSS file and double click on its contents to start editing. Committing the changes may be done via Cmd/Ctrl+S.

Many other fixes landed as well for Web Inspector. Changing the value of a hexadecimal number will now be treated correctly, as will a console message’s position for formatted scripts. Furthermore, property abbreviation has been disabled and the periods at the end of error messages have been removed.

In light of improving spec alignment, the behavior of the “start” and “end” values for the text-align property has been updated to match other browsers. DOM bindings have been implemented for the ping attribute on anchor tags and the noresize attribute on frames may now be set using JavaScript. Finally, the sizes of H1-elements nested in HTML5 sectioning elements will now be determined based on their depth.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Some bits of work on the Touch new tab page: support for theming and refactoring.
• Speech recognizion in Chromium will now use FLAC rather than Speex as its codec.
• The onerror event may now be fired for prefetch link-relational types.
• The Accept-Language and Accept-Charset headers won’t be send anymore in all cases.
• JavaScriptCore is now capable of using JIT compilation for regular expressions on SH4 platforms.
• Chromium now supports the “none” value for media-element preloading, e.g. <video preload=none>.
• The beforeunload event is now available for icon and perfetch link relational types.
• The font-sizes of the omnibox and tabs on Chromium GTK have been tweaked.
• An issue has been fixed with a tab’s spinner when prerendering would be used.
• The HTTP authentication dialog will now also use WebUI (HTML) for its content.
• A list of the opened pages will now be exposed via JSON, for remote debugging.
• Two fixes came in for the :any-selector: style sharing and :last-child selecting.
• Clipping has been sped up for accelerated 2D Canvasses in Chromium.
• Accelerated path drawing, e.g. drawing beziers, has been improved as well.
• The orientation and color settings in the print preview page are now functional.
• The print-preview page now shows the option to print to a PDF file rather than to a printer.
• A fast-path for parsing CSS rgb() colors with percent values has been implemented.
• The title of print-preview tabs has been changed to reflect the page they’re previewing.
• Support for creating screenshots has been implemented for the WebDriver implementation.
• Line layout has been sped up by 10% by optimizing overflow computations on them.
• Changing certain CSS properties on SVG elements won’t initiate a re-layout anymore.
• Chromium OS will now shows a notification when a SMS message has been received.

And that’ll be all again for this week. Check back tomorrow for some exciting (personal) news! 🙂