Much later than usual, but live from Mountain View this time! Last week brought 838 updates, 468 at Chromium’s, the rest at WebKit’s. Highlights include work on a new tool for WebKit Gardeners, many updates for Web Inspector and two more parsing patches for Adobe’s CSS Regions.

Adam Barth started to work on a new Gardening tool for WebKit, called garden-o-matic. Gardening is the act of making sure that the build tree remains green, ensuring there are no unexpected test failures, etcetera. The idea is to provide a dashboard to developers allowing convenient access to actions like reverting changes, finding unexpected failures and the build which made them fail.

Now that WebRTC has landed as a Chrome dependency and work on implementing several related features in WebKit is well on its way, Magnus Flodman landed an early implementation of the Media Stream Manager. This Manager will coordinate between WebKit’s API, permissions, WebRTC and of course your camera and microphone, ensuring that the feature will work smooth and secure.

The multiple profile feature has received quite some work as well this week. The setup UI for a new profile has been implemented, deleting profiles now is a possibility, the displayed avatar can be customized and will contain most profile-related options. Finally, it has been enabled by default on the Views UI, presumably Chromium OS.

An incredible amount of changes happened for Web Inspector last week. You can now drag and drop elements and other nodes in the Element Pane, a new settings panel has been added, and cache and cookies can soon be removed via the Network Panel. Speaking of which, you can now also search in the Network Panel, albeit still limited to filenames and paths.

The specificity of !important properties for the Inspector has been fixed, links to stylesheets will now open in the Style Panel, multiple resources will be shown when a URL is referred to multiple times and requests made by plugins will be shown in the Network Panel. Finally, it’s now clearer how to add a new style rule and adding CSS properties will no longer result in messy CSS rules.

As for specification related updates, the value property of an indeterminate progress bar will now return zero. A change event will be triggered when the selected files of a file input change, column-break-inside: avoid has been re-enabled and more key-bindings have been added to range inputs. Furthermore, parsing capabilities for the flow and from-flow properties, as part of their CSS Regions proposal. Finally, more work on switching WebKit’s Render Tree to a float-based representation has been done.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• A new user interface for the media controls in Chromium is being implemented, though not yet available.
• Return of the Caps Lock within Chrome OS.
• Larger favicons will be displayed on the new New Tab Page for the most visited websites.
• Edges of accelerated layers will now be anti-aliased within Chromium.
• NPAPI plugins are now able to participate in form submission.
• Shift-clicking on the previous and next buttons will now open the subsequent page in a new tab.
• Enabling or disabling panels may now be done through about:flags.
• The size target of chrome.dll has been increased by about 200 KB.
• Shaders will now be shared among multiple compositors, improving performance as compiling them is expensive.
• Audio rendering can now be done through a low-latency path, eliminating several noticeable delays.
• Flicker when switching tabs on Chromium OS has been fixed.
• The text-to-speech extension API has been extended with additional info, such as word boundaries.
• The login keyboard for Chromium OS now uses an animation to slide in, rather than pop-in.
• Support for ShadowBlur was added to the Qt port, improving performance.
• Zoltan Herczeg now is a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!

And that’ll be all! I will be in the Mountain View area until July 23rd and will attend Open Web Camp III (thanks, John Foliot!). If you want to meet up, feel free to drop me a note.