Last week brought 1,352 updates to the projects, 445 for WebKit and 907 towards Chromium’s repository. Highlights include Chromium 15, the download attribute and work on implementing positioned floats.

The Web Intents shim was announced by Paul Kinlan about a month ago, and last week the initial signs of Chrome’s implementation started to show up. While it’s only preparatory work so far, a command line switch has been added and work on WebKit’s side is about to start.

In light of adding a cd()-like feature to Web Inspector, some refactoring has landed last week. An initiator column has been added to the network overview, and instead of disabling it altogether, the cache will now be cleared after navigation. Custom getters in the property pane won’t appear dimmed anymore.

As for specification-related changes, the selectionDirection property on input and textarea elements is now supported, just as the sizes attribute for link-elements is now supported as well. Specifying unicode-bidi as plaintext on textarea elements works correctly again, behavior of the Float32Array constructor has been fixed and v8 can now actually serialize script elements correctly.

Following Darin’s announcement, this response from Ian Hickson and the actual edit to HTML, WebKit now supports the download attribute on anchor elements. It’s quite simple really: specify the download attribute, optionally defining a filename, and the browser will download the anchor’s location rather than navigate to it.

Dave Hyatt has started to work on implementing positioned floats in WebKit. Currently, floated elements either float to the right or left side of their container, allowing content appear on the opposite side. Positioned floats allow floated elements to appear, for example, in the middle, spreading content between the left and right hand area’s of the floated element. While there definitely is progress, no actual rendering effects will be visible at this point.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The first basic layout test for the Web Audio API landed!
• A remarkable change from Apple’s side: support for a built-in -webkit-pictograph font which can
  render image-like glyphs. The font face itself seems to be private.
• Chrome can now identify itself with the freeway running between California and Montana.
• Larger hit-boxes will apply to select-boxes when Touch UI support has been enabled.
• Knobs of disabled range controls will no longer be draggable.
• The Data-tab of Chromium’s net-internals page has been split up in three tabs: Import, Export and Capture.
• Tests for validating WebKit’s WebVTT parser (for <track>) have been added.
• Printing an accelerated canvas in Chromium now works properly again.
• As work on WebKit’s brand new XML Parser continues, a wild tokenizer appeared.
• Chromium’s close-animation on Mac OS X has been sped up by request of the Gods.
• The avatars available for multiple profiles have been revised, and several new ones have been added as well.
• Chromium will now remember whether you wanted to print the last page in grey-scale or in color.
• The filename-text for file upload controls is now properly aligned with the button-text for various platforms.
• Splitting up the chrome-library in components can now create views.dll/.so as well.
• Work on eliminating 2-pass painting for composited pages already gained 20% in performance in tests.
• Support for basic RenderRegion and collecting flowed elements was added for CSS Regions.
• Support for bitmap images was added to Chromium OS’  file browser.
• Two new experiments related to Instant will be done with 10% of the Google Chrome users.
• The Web UI Task Manager will be enabled by default for the Chrome OS 14 release.
• Motorola is busy adjusting WebKit GTK to use the v8 JavaScript engine.

And for a pretty exciting update on browser usage: open source-based browsers (being Chrome and Firefox) now serve the majority of the web with a combined market share of 50.09%! That is pretty cool.