With 912 commits at Chromium and 590 at WebKit, totaling up at 1,502 changes, a fair amount of changes have happened again. Highlights include Mutation Observers for Chromium and animatable background images.

Chromium has reached a version number which equals a pentagonal pyramidal number: 18. In total, 7,107 Chromium commits, 4,198 WebKit commits and 526 v8 commits are included, totaling up to 11,831 changes for the Google Chrome 17 release, besides changes in other related projects such as Skia and NaCL.

Mutation Observers have been enabled for Chromium, which provide a much better alternative to DOM Mutation Events. Though still disabled by default, Chromium has been taught how to handle meta viewport elements, the scoped attribute for scoped stylesheets landed, table cells now understand widths in percentages and security around loading out-of-band text tracks has been improved by utilizing CORS.

WebKit now supports animations between background, border and list images utilizing the cross-fade() function which landed a few weeks ago. Parsing for multiple grid rows and columns has been added, as has parsing for the wrap and wrap-reverse values for the flex-flow property.

As a first step in being able to CSS Regions, background colors will now be applied. The behavior of !important in inline style sets has been aligned with the specification, automatic color adjustments for disabled input elements has been removed for Chromium and various more CSS 2.1 test failures have been fixed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

• The Screen, Terminal and VT100 classes, all part of an HTML-based terminal emulator, landed.
• A shutdown option has been added to Chromium OS’ wrench menu.
• Chromium Profile avatars will now be displayed in Windows profile-specific shortcuts.
• The three-step animation for panel minimizing is now also implemented for Linux.
• Safari using the WebKit2 API will stop the system and display from going to sleep mode.
• An initial implementation of accelerated compositing for WebKitGTK was committed, using Clutter.
• Web Inspector audits can now be stopped while they’re in-progress.
• Intel’s Xingnan Wang sped up the Web Audio API’s sample convolving by 70 percent.
• Support for a high-contrast mode for bubbles has been added.
• The aria-hidden attribute will now be working correctly for iframe elements.
• Support for Panels has been moved behind a flag again, except for Dev and Canary releases.
• The WebUI Task Manager is now enabled by default again, and will persist its window size.
• Work on GPU accelerated Filters has started in Chromium, behind the --enable-accelerated-filters flag.
• By adding a binding, CSS Filters can be used in Chromium by compiling with ENABLE_CSS_FILTERS=1.
• Moving the caret on Windows will now move in visual order rather than in logical order.
• Some performance pain--points for scrolling on YouTube have been addressed.
• Two recent Apple hires (NSFW) seem to have started with upstreaming parts of the iOS port.
• Yours truly is now a WebKit committer.

And that’ll be all for last week again. Things to keep an eye out for this week include custom written CSS Lexer and work by Simon Fraser to make the CSS Filter property animatable!