Archive for August, 2013

Zoom Dependent devicePixelRatio, Clear Error Messages and JSON for XMLHttpRequest

Published on in Blink, Google Chrome, Last Week, tech. Version: Chrome 31

1,621 commits were made by 417 authors to the Blink, Chromium, v8 and Skia repositories last week.

Within Chrome DevTools, work continues on implementing the new Layer panel. The <Cmd/Ctrl>-<\> shortcut has been added as a shortcut to pause and continue the debugger. Mike has been busy with improving messages shared by Blink for errors and exceptions: anything from XMLHttpRequest to localStorage and tainted images for WebGL will now throw clearer errors.

The window.devicePixelRatio property and the resolution and -webkit-device-pixel-ratio Media Queries will now be affected by the applied browser zoom. Julien started with removing support for the prefixed -webkit-marquee CSS properties and CSS Shapes now supports shape-outside image values, and can be enabled using their own runtime flag. Support for the text-decoration property shorthand landed again as well.

XMLHttpRequests in Blink do now support “json” as a responseType. Support for .wav files has been brought to the Web Audio API on Android. Accessing a cross-origin frame’s location setter may now throw an exception. A new about:flags entry also has been added for an experiment in which touchmove events aren’t being distributed to the renderer anymore. Finally, the DataTransferItemList.remove() method has been implemented.

When building Chromium for Android, the “chromium_testshell” target is the most complete browser you can build. Tommy has now updated it to include a menu option for signing in and out of Chromium.

Other changes which occurred last week:

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WebGL and Device Motion for Android, Port Forwarding and Named Grid Areas

Published on in Blink, Last Week, tech. Version: Chrome 30

Another 1,859 revisions were made by 444 authors in the Chromium, Blink, Skia and v8 repositories last week. This article describes these changes, up to revision 216962.

Chrome DevTools continues to make debugging mobile pages easier, this time by adding support for port forwarding on chrome://inspect. It works for both local and remote servers, and is amazingly simple to use. They also switched to using rjsmin for JavaScript minification, and are working on a 3D layer view.

The Downloads Extension API has been promoted to the Stable channel, and will be available starting Chrome 30. Also new is a discussion group for talking about the Google Cloud Messaging-powered pushMessaging extension API.

Work on the Chrome-based Android WebView continues and support for displaying fullscreen video has been implemented, with in-page video support pending. The Remoting application for Android now supports paired authentication and had some UI polishing done.

v8 added experimental support for the Array.prototype.find and findIndex methods, part of ECMAScript 6, and now natively supports ArrayBuffer, DataView and typed arrays by default. Blink has been updated to use v8’s implementation of these instead of its own. Blink now also sets the Prototype of the interface object to that of its parent’s. Finally, Promises will be exposed in Worker-threads as well now.

Web Component’s ::content pseudo-element and :host pseudo-class have been implemented. Julien implemented support for named grid areas for Blink’s CSS Grid Layout implementation, and SVG’s stroke-dasharray CSS property has been made animatable.

Christophe Dumez improved Blink’s specification compliance for Text.splitText(), NodeList.item() and HTMLSelectElement.item(). The document.hasFocus() method will now return false when a tab doesn’t have focus, and the imageSmoothingEnabled property on a canvas object has been unprefixed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

More next week!

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