With 484 commits to the WebKit repository and 742 to the Chromium one, totaling up to 1,226 changesets, it has been an average week. This week’s highlights include the Print Preview feature, now available by default, compact navigation and the Page Visibility API.

One well anticipated feature, Print Preview, has now been enabled by default for Google Chrome Builds. The feature generates a PDF file from the opened website and allows you to either save it to a file or send it to a printer, with various options such as orientation and use of colors. Print Preview is not available within Chromium, due to limitations on the used PDF library.

A new type of navigation has been added to Google Chrome, namely Compact Navigation. By making the address bar optional and moving the wrench menu to the title-bar, Chrome’s user interface will now only be 30 pixels in height on Windows. While this would be ideal for pinned tabs and applications, it can cause serious security issues for secured websites as the displayed address is no longer visible.

Shishir Agrawal landed an initial version of the Web Performance’s latest specification: the Page Visibility API. The API allows developers to tune performance of their application based on whether the page (or, more commonly, tab) is visible, similar to how requestAnimationFrame stops working when the tab is hidden. While browsers such as Chrome and Firefox will increase the minimum interval for timers to about a second when a page doesn’t have focus, the API allows for more friendly approaches to be taken by the developer.

As for other specification related updates, the onchange event will now fire for radio-groups when the user changes selection through their keyboard. An issue in handling the currentColor value for SVG elements has been fixed, positioning of validation bubbles on non-text input elements has been corrected, an element’s onclick event won’t fire anymore if it got removed earlier on and the noresize attribute for frames can now be set via JavaScript. Finally, Dave Hyatt seems to start implementing the CSS3 Grid Layout Module!

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The XSS Auditor doesn’t block all http-equiv meta-elements anymore.
• The style sidebar in Web Inspector will now be updated based on changes in
  the Resources Panel, including for free-flow text editing.
• Throttling of the WebGL framerate has been made more accurate.
• A minor update for the Media Streaming API: exceptions for getUserMedia.
• Semi-transparent colors for an element’s outlines won’t overlap at the corners anymore.
• Due to this addition, Chromium will be able to use DNS Prefetching again.
• The path, build type and more additional information will now be shown in about:version
• The Remoting host-component has been removed from Chromium, supposedly going to be a plugin.
• Chromoting seems to have officially been renamed to Remoting now.
• An option has been added to toggle the availability of background extensions.
• Panels on Windows can now contain and display (themed) title bars.
• Pop-ups will now properly be blocked when created in sandboxed iframes.
• IndexedDB will no longer be visible within sandboxed iframes.
• Error messages for the Application Cache will now show up in Web Inspector.
• Following a series of patches, strict PassOwnPtr has now been enabled for Chromium.
• The headers of an request are now retrievable by the WebRequest API.
• A context-menu has been added to Chromium OS’ file browser.
• Function constructors can now be blocked by Content-Security-Policy.
• Touch Icons have been linked up to the Chromium post, though still no visible usage.

As a special comment, I’d like to thank RIM’s Eli Fidler for the great chats and demonstrating WebKit’s remote debugging capability of the PlayBook. Mostly thanks to Krijn, Peter-Paul and Stephen, I had a great time at Mobilism. If you’re into the mobile web, be sure to attend the event next year!