With lucky number 13 -Chromium’s current version- now available, version 12 has been branched. Last week’s 1,423 commits bring highlights such as Google Chrome Canary which will be coming to Mac OS X, a new CSS property prefix for the EPUB format and lots of removed code.

While it has not been released yet, Google does seem to be ready to release Google Chrome Canary for Mac OS X systems. The browser cannot be made the default browser through the preferences and the release monitor says that the latest version was released today, using the same revision as Windows’ Canary.

Web Inspector will now show hyperlink auditing requests in the network panel. Copying data from the Resources panel has been made easier, the option “Open link in new tab” has been added to several context menus and it’s now possible to follow retained paths in detailed heap snapshots.

Following discussion on both the mailing list and during the contributor meeting, support for WML (“Wireless Markup Language”) has been removed from WebKit. This was a logical step as only BlackBerry needs to continue to support WML, and are doing so through a proprietary plugin. Microsoft and Opera still support it. Other code removed includes the Image Resizer, support for datagrids and Android’s build system.

As for specification related updates, setting outerHTML on an element will now merge text nodes. The onchange event on text fields has been made more reliable, styling a speech input-button with paddings and borders has been improved and the root element will now establish a new block formatting context, and will therefore expand to enclose overhanging floats. Finally, the CSS sibling selector (~) now works properly with the :target pseudo-class.

WebKit now supports the -epub- CSS property-prefix as an alias, similar to its support for the -apple- and -khtml- prefixes. This addition was made following a conference call in the EPUB Working Group last Thursday, and while not all issues have been resolved yet, it’s likely that they’re here to stay. One thing which is surprising is the fact that all vendors will use the same prefix: -epub-, contrary to CSS’ vendor prefixes.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• WebKit now supports localized date strings for date input fields.
• Chris Evans added a setting which will, when enabled, be able to block insecure content on secure pages.
• Support for pressing mouse-buttons has been added to Chromium’s Web Driver implementation.
• Support for executing asynchronous scripts has also been added to the Chromium’s Web Driver.
• The Web Inspector’s Extension API namespace has been changed to chrome.experimental.devtools.
• Initial support for creating panels has been added for Windows, including dragging them.
• The framework for speeding up SVG Filters for multicore processors has landed, including an
  implementation for the FETurbulence filter.
• Mark Pilgrim started porting Mozilla’s IndexedDB test-cases and made small bug fixes. Curious.
• An FFTFrame implementation for FFmpeg has been added for the Web Audio API.
• Docking Web Inspector to the browser window using the WebKit2 API is now a possibility.
• The first parts of the fullscreen API for Safari on Windows have landed at WebKit.
• An early take at supporting drag and drop for Chromium’s Touch UI New Tab Page has landed.
• The new Quota API may be enabled by supplying the --enable-quota flag to Chromium.
• Dimitri Glazkov taught CSS sub-selector chains how to deal with shadow descendants.
• An early version of a Views-based combobox has landed for Chromium.
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 now have a lower priority for the IO process.
• Support for transparent WebKit instances was added for WebView under Windows.
• The Content-Security-Policy implementation now blocks eval and stylesheets, inline ones too.

Since I won’t have any time at all this week, I expect the update to be rather short. Till then!