Viewport-relative CSS Units, Speech API and synchronized Extension Settings
Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 19
Another 1,806 changes landed in both repositories last week, 755 for WebKit and 1,051 for Chromium. Highlights include new viewport-relative CSS units, work on a JavaScript Speech API and ..
Within Chromium, a new page on the New Tab Page has been added aiming to provide suggestions of pages to visit, which can be enabled through about:flags if you’d like to follow the progress. As for extensions, Settings will now be synchronized by default, the Font Settings API has received a setFontName method and a sample extension demonstrating the Download API’s download() method is now available.
Style declarations within Web Inspector can now be added anywhere in the declaration rather than just at the end. The DOM counter graphs aren’t experimental anymore, color pickers will be closed when either escape or enter gets pressed and timeline records will be opened when you click on a DOM counter graph. Furthermore, the Profiles panel has been enabled for Web Workers and suggestions will now be given for Watch Expressions.
WebKit now supports an intra-line character grid for Japanese text layouts. The initial value for the -webkit-flow-into CSS property has been changed to “none”, the display type for inline flexboxen is now supported and David Barton is continuing his work on improving MathML support, this time by fixing <msubsup> formatting. The :empty pseudo-selector won’t apply anymore when scripted additions occur, clipping behavior for a fieldset’s <legend> element has been fixed and the :scope pseudo-class is now supported as well.
The Shadow DOM’s ShadowRoot has been taught about the innerHTML property, and the <content> element will now behave like an unknown HTML element when it’s used outside of a Shadow DOM sub-tree. Microdata’s property collections gained the namedItem method and the NamedFlow object for the CSS Region implementation now has the getRegionsByContentNode method. SVG’s <use> element has been integrated with the Shadow Root implementation and work is being done to stop SVG from mutating CSS styles directly.
Joe Thomas landed support for three new CSS units: vw, vh and vmin. These units allow you to define sizes based on the viewport’s width, height or smallest of the two. Following an announcement on webkit-dev, Hans landed an initial patch towards implementing the JavaScript Speech API.
Other changes which occurred last week:
- Trailing new-lines will be removed again when pasting text in a single-line text box.
- IPP optimizations have been enabled for the Web Audio API’s Biquad filter.
- Adrienne Walker is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
- Cloning and transferring ArrayBuffers have been implemented for JSC per Khronos’ typed array spec.
- Lines containing right-to-left text on Facebook can be selected again.
- Very early basics of the new KURLWTFURL URL parser were landed by Benjamin.
- The XMLHttpRequest Blob response test on html5test.com will now recognize Chromium.
- Layers required for elements which potentially have to hide overflow will now be created lazily.
- Plenty of BlackBerry upstreaming has been done again last week.
- Working towards date and time input pickers, a HTML-capable popup API has been added.
- CSS Regions can now be enabled again in Chromium, through a flag or about:flags.
- Experimental Web Inspector (Developer Tools) features can now be made accessible through about:flags.
- A public Dart build master has been made public, mentioning quite some bots already.
- More accurate session restore is now available for Chromium by default.
- Smooth Scrolling support has been added for the WebKit GTK port.
- The WebKit2 API now features the possibility to suspend and resume timers and animations.
And that’ll be all again, cheers for reading.