Last week brought a total of 1,228 changes, 529 at WebKit and 699 at Chromium. Highlights include CurveCP, a possible alternative to the TCP transport layer, multi-core SVG Filters and DynamicsCompressorNode.

A private extension API has been added to Chromium adding the capability to communicate with handshake-less TCP service via a proxied Web Socket, such as IRC and SSH. This addresses one of the limitations which were made in favor of security and will, for now, only be available for selected extensions like an SSH client.

Furthermore, an initial implementation of Dan Bernstein’s CurveCP transport layer landed in Chromium. While the plans are still unknown and not everyone is optimistic about the layer itself, CurveCP is similar to TCP but uses high-speed high-security elliptic-curve cryptography to protect every packet against espionage and sabotage.

Web Inspector has been enhanced with the ability to collect background networking events. These are events which occur while the Inspector itself is closed, but will be available when you open it up again. Non-color properties won’t receive a color picker in the Styles pane anymore and incrementing or decrementing very large numeric values in CSS rules no longer results in an invalid declaration.

Now that the ParallelJobs Framework has been available for about a month, work has started to enhance several SVG filters to distribute work over multiple processor cores. The FELighting, FEGaussianBlur and FEConvolveMatrix filters have been updated, yielding performance improvements between 10 and 30 percent.

As for specification-related improvements, HTML5’s numeric input won’t show a zero anymore if the input’s range does not allow the value 0. The region of an area element will be updated when it dynamically has been altered, border-radius properties with negative values will be ignored and document.activeElement will now point to the active iframe element in case content within it has been focused.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• A new version of Chrome’s client-side phishing model has been rolled out to Chromium.
• Text-based input elements have been updated to use the Shadow DOM.
• Work on <input type=color> has begun within WebKit, with various patches up for review.
• <output>, <meter> and <progress> elements with display: block aren’t tab-focusable anymore.
• Brent Fulgham and Dirk Pranke are now WebKit Reviewers, congratulations!
• Support for WebDriver’s alert commands was added to Chromium’s ChromeDriver implementation.
• A separate link-relation has been added for prerender, to distinguish it from prefetch.
• The disable-javascript-urls Content-Security-Policy directive has been removed.
• Some minor progress has been made on updating the Web Socket implementation.
• Detailed Heap Snapshots in Web Inspector are now enabled by default for Chromium.
• Two new extension API methods were added to Chromium regarding handwriting functionalities.
• Support for local stream requests was added to the Media Stream API.
• Chris Rogers added an implementation for the Web Audio API’s DynamicsCompressorNode.
• Support for real-time audio threads was added to Chromium, but only implemented for Mac OS X.
• The event.clientX/clientY properties will now be non-zero when tracking a click on a label.
• The HTML5 details element will remain enabled for Chromium.
• Images have been added to Chromium for a new Image Burner user-interface.
• Support for Motion JPEG has been added to Chrome’s libjpeg-turbo implementation.

And that’ll be all for this week! 🙂