WebGL Inspection, Sticky Positioning and Windows 8 Updates
Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 23
Last week saw 993 Chromium commits and 650 WebKit ones, totaling up to 1,643 changes in total.
Chrome binaries will now be signed with compatibility GUIDs for Windows 8, which mainly impacts theming in High Contrast mode and heuristics about potential compatibility issues. Furthermore, forwarding of search queries in Windows 8 UI mode has been implemented, and mouse input events from styli will no longer be ignored.
Web Inspector’s Profile panel is getting a great new (experimental!) feature from Andrey, namely WebGL inspection. The Timeline panel is now able to show the cause for a style recalculation, the console.time() method now uses performance.now() for more accuracy and more work has been done on improving performance.
Simon landed support for sticky CSS positioning, which limits an element to be positioned within both it’s container and the viewport. Support for parsing the -webkit-text-decoration-style has been added, the arguments for the blend-mode property can now be parsed and CSS masking and filters are now being applied in the right order.
Blob and File System URIs are now considered to be same-origin for Content Security Policy and computed styles for 2D Transforms have been aligned with the specification. An initial implementation of CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside property landed, WebKit didn’t miss out on the usual set of Flexbox improvements and David’s work on re-implementing Multiple Columns on top of CSS Regions saw two more commits.
The postMessage() function now accepts any kind of data as its message, allowing you to post arrays and objects as well. Changing the class attribute on any kind of element will now update the classList as well, and work is being done for allowing pointer lock in sandboxed iframes. The automatic DOM transactions feature for Undo Manager is now implemented, just like the item() method, and the undoscope attribute has been removed.
Another new feature which is in the works, is being able to use the “overflow-y” property as a way to make the render view paginated, as part of implementing the Generated Content for Paged Media specification.
Other changes which occurred last week:
- Line breaking performance for complex text has been sped up by roughly 25 percent.
- The contents of elements with scolling overflow behavior can now be composited.
- Error events will now be triggered on images which cannot be loaded due to CSP restrictions.
- Wins of 65% and another 27% on V8’s v8-real-early JavaScript benchmark for JavaScriptCore.
- The feBlend filter can now be hardware accelerated through Skia, mostly interesting for Chromium.
- Usage of -webkit prefixed CSS properties will be tracked as Chromium histograms, for those who opted in.
- Mutation Events can now be disabled per context, for example for Chromium Apps and extensions.
- The new storage limitations can now also cover WebSQL databases from third parties in Web Workers.
- Parsing and displaying for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom content is now supported by the BlackBerry port.
- The BlackBerry port enabled support for the getUserMedia API and blob responses for XHR.
- The EFL port enabled support for slider tick mark snapping and the new CSS Text Decoration features.
- Chromium Android builds now default to building in the Debug configuration.
- The Website Settings UI has been enabled by default for Chromium and Canary builds.
- James added basic configuration and files for moving the Chromium Compositor away from WebKit.
To finish with some other nice news, yours truly became a full Chromium committer last week :--).