Last week brought another 1,245 accepted changelists in the repositories of Chromium and WebKit. Highlights include a new Settings extension API for Chromium, CSS Regions and Exclusions being enabled by default and a separate i18n project for v8.

Chromium’s new New Tab Page, which has been in the works for several months now, now is the default one for the browser. It contains three pages, most visited, Apps and bookmarks, is touch-friendly and accessible. It looks quite good too. If you really want to go back to the former version, you can use the --new-tab-page-3 command line flag.

The experimental Internationalization API that’s being implemented in v8 has moved to it’s own open-source repository, allowing the work to progress more visibly. The API will expose the possibility to utilize features like localized string matching, number formatting and date and time formatting to web authors.

Benjamin Kalman has landed the first part of the long awaited Settings extension API to Chromium. This API will allow extension authors to specify settings for their extensions, which can then be synchronized across a user’s computers. Just like bookmarks. Early documentation is available on Chrome’s Google Code docs.

Within Web Inspector, the Network Panel won’t show local resources statuses as pending anymore. You can now choose to hide user-agent stylesheets in the style panes, the Resource Panel will now show cookies for the main resource, folders in the Script Panel are now optional and it’s now clearer which properties are non-enumerable when expanding objects. Finally, scripts from different domains won’t appear in the same folder anymore.

As for specification related updates, the width of a numeric input will now depend on the values it accepts. Basic horizontal flexing has been implemented for the new Flexible Box implementation and WebSockets now accept multiple sub-protocols and supports the protocol and binaryType attributes. Tom Zakrajsek made sure that unknown HTML elements now derive from HTMLUnknownElement and advanced text shaping was implemented for Linux.

Following these two commits, Ryosuke Niwa was finally able to claim victory on his crusade to get rid of wrapping spans and Apple’s Apple-style-span class in WebKit’s editing component. His work resulted in much cleaner generated HTML for editable components.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• Support for CSS Regions and Exclusions is now enabled by default!
• Work is being done to support the Wayland windowing system in Chromium.
• Behavior of the volume keys on Chromium OS were updated per the latest UX requirements.
• Support for XmlHttpRequest was added to Chromium’s WebRequest extension API.
• An important algorithm for phishing detection, namely feature extraction, has been sped up.
• Embedders for the HTML5 track-list objects for Chromium were implemented in WebKit.
• The multiple-profile avatar menu has been changed to display a bubble view instead.
• The pre-render field trail has been improved to affect 99% of the people.
• Exposure, blur, sharpen and autofix filters have been added to Chromium OS’ image editor.
• Scrolling frames and iframes can now create composited layers, and got a fast-path.
• More work on implementing Web Intents in Chromium has been done.
• More basic layout tests for the Web Audio API landed in WebKit.
• An initial version of the new XML Tree Builder within WebKit landed as well.
• Rubber band scrolling has been enabled for Chromium.

And that’ll be all again, let’s see what this week brings 🙂