Archive for September, 2013

Transparent VP8 Videos, Audio Codecs for MSE and Chrome’s 5th Birthday

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

Last week yielded 1,582 commits in the Blink, Chromium, Skia and v8 repositories, made by 427 unique authors. Incidentally, Chrome turned five years old last Thursday Monday — thanks Peter!

Various changes were made in Chrome’s media stack last week. When using the Media Source Extensions API, support for Opus and MP3 as audio codecs has been implemented. Also new is support for VP8 alpha-playback, which means that videos can now have transparency.

Tables with display:inline set will now be rendered as inline tables rather than block elements, and border-spacing won’t be doubled anymore between table row groups. Philip also changed various JavaScript properties, such as offsetWidth and offsetTop, to only do partial layouts when they’ve been changed.

Arguments must now be passed to the CSSHostRule.addRule() and deleteRule() methods. The mousemove event has been made cancellable. Finally, the unprefixed onanimation* attributes have been implemented on HTML Elements, but won’t be exposed to the web until unprefixing has been completed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • DevTools’ go-to-location feature using <ctrl>+<p> now supports line numbers by using a colon: “:80”.
  • Adding a webapp to your homescreen on Android will be available in about://flags.
  • A People Search feature seems to be coming to Chrome, based on Google+ APIs.
  • Spatial Navigation will be enabled for the Chrome-based Android WebView.
  • The chrome.usb.getDevices() and openDevice() Extension APIs have been implemented.

That’d be all for this week!

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WheelEvents, Elliptical Canvas Paths and chrome://inspect Improvements

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

Last week, 430 authors committed 1,760 changes to the Blink, Chromium, Skia and v8 repositories. This article highlights some of them, up to revision 220870.

Christophe deprecated the returnValue property on all events, and instead properly implemented the property on the onbeforeunload event. He made arguments mandatory on a ton of native methods, and fixed the <select>.remove() method to act as described in DOM4 is no index argument has been passed. Two weeks ago he also implemented the WheelEvent from DOM Level 3.

The preferred and intrinsic width calculations for multiple column layout have been aligned with the specification. Support for ellipses as primary citizens in the world of 2d canvas path segments has been implemented. The change which makes devicePixelRatio include browser zoom has now been enabled by default. Support for the paint-order style for SVG elements has been implemented, as has the object-fit property which aids in maintaining the aspect ratio of replaced contents within its content box.

As for experimental features, the viewport will be reset to its implicit size when @viewport rules at-rules are being dynamically removed. The escape key may now be used to dismiss an active <dialog> window, which have also been made ARIA-aware and are now able to fire close() events. Work on unprefixed CSS Animation also continues, now with the CSSOM part.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Thanks for reading!

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