Web Sockets-10, invisible cursors for Windows and a fabulous animation

Published on July 21st, 2011 in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 14

Last week brought 1,204 changes to the Chromium and WebKit repositories, with highlights such as work on the new Web Sockets protocol, a minimum window size on Windows and collectively improving Web Inspector.

Web Inspector is now able to show alert modal-dialogs in docked mode as well. More work has been done on enabling debugging of Shared Web Workers, performance of panel switching has been improved, resizing of the sidebar pane has been fixed for the Timeline and Profile panels and a flickering “please wait” message on Chromium has been removed. For Chromium, some infrastructure has been added for optionally gathering user metrics, which in the long run can be used to improve Web Inspector based on actual usage. Finally, welcome to John J. Barton!

As for improved specification support, Chromium on Windows is now able to hide the cursor by setting cursor: none. Canvas compositing with a global destination-atop now works properly, SVG Text rendered by Chromium will now always use geometricPrecision, associating form elements with non-existing forms has been aligned with the ES5 specification. Finally, in order to improve coverage of tests over the CSS Selectors implementation, the official test-suite has been imported.

Work on implementing the latest Web Socket Protocol is coming together nicely as well, tools are being updated, the new hand-shake has been implemented and a patch for the updated framing structure landed earlier today. Adobe added parsing of two new properties as well, CSS Region’s content-order property and Exclusion’s wrap-shape one.

Other changes which occurred last week:

A WebRTC Audio Device has been implemented for the renderer process, start of binding it with WebKit?
Accessibility notifications have been added to the range input-type when its value changes.
The new New Tab Page now includes a link to the Chrome Web Store, which cannot be uninstalled.
Improvements for Chromium’s component build: a separate UI library and one define instead of many.
An experimental implementation for SPDY over WebSockets has been added to Chromium.
Initial support for remote Cloud Print servers in the Print Preview dialog has been implemented.
A mechanism was added to Chromium to draw a user’s attention to an event within a Panel.
Lots of new links have been added to the chrome://chrome-urls/ page.
Proper sanity checks for arguments to AudioContext will now be done by WebKit.
The Web Audio API has been enabled for WebKit’s Dump Render Tree, welcoming future layout tests.
More progress on switching to abstract layout types for WebKit’s rendering tree.
Work has been done to ensure a minimum window size of Chromium on Windows systems.
garden-o-matic can now roll-out patches, shows test results and has a fabulous animation if all’s good.

And that’ll be all again. I’m going to try to get back on the schedule of publishing on Mondays 🙂

2 Responses to “Web Sockets-10, invisible cursors for Windows and a fabulous animation”

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I wish the Web Audio API wasn’t turned on by default for linux and windows chromium builds, because it’s buggy still and has audio buffering problems on these OSes still (Mac OS X is okay though it seems).

It works perfectly well if you use it correctly, on all platforms, and bug fixes are still being made every week (as is the case with every major feature). The feature is still vendor prefixed and is more than ready to be experimented with by web authors, so I’m excited to see what kind of use people will come up with.