Last week brought a total of 1,228 changes, 529 at WebKit and 699 at Chromium. Highlights include CurveCP, a possible alternative to the TCP transport layer, multi-core SVG Filters and DynamicsCompressorNode.
A private extension API has been added to Chromium adding the capability to communicate with handshake-less TCP service via a proxied Web Socket, such as IRC and SSH. This addresses one of the limitations which were made in favor of security and will, for now, only be available for selected extensions like an SSH client.
Furthermore, an initial implementation of Dan Bernstein’s CurveCP transport layer landed in Chromium. While the plans are still unknown and not everyone is optimistic about the layer itself, CurveCP is similar to TCP but uses high-speed high-security elliptic-curve cryptography to protect every packet against espionage and sabotage.
Web Inspector has been enhanced with the ability to collect background networking events. These are events which occur while the Inspector itself is closed, but will be available when you open it up again. Non-color properties won’t receive a color picker in the Styles pane anymore and incrementing or decrementing very large numeric values in CSS rules no longer results in an invalid declaration.
Now that the ParallelJobs Framework has been available for about a month, work has started to enhance several SVG filters to distribute work over multiple processor cores. The FELighting, FEGaussianBlur and FEConvolveMatrix filters have been updated, yielding performance improvements between 10 and 30 percent.
As for specification-related improvements, HTML5’s numeric input won’t show a zero anymore if the input’s range does not allow the value 0. The region of an area element will be updated when it dynamically has been altered, border-radius properties with negative values will be ignored and document.activeElementwill now point to the active iframe element in case content within it has been focused.
Other changes which occurred last week:
A new version of Chrome’s client-side phishing model has been rolled out to Chromium.
With 484 commits to the WebKit repository and 742 to the Chromium one, totaling up to 1,226 changesets, it has been an average week. This week’s highlights include the Print Preview feature, now available by default, compact navigation and the Page Visibility API.
One well anticipated feature, Print Preview, has now been enabled by default for Google Chrome Builds. The feature generates a PDF file from the opened website and allows you to either save it to a file or send it to a printer, with various options such as orientation and use of colors. Print Preview is not available within Chromium, due to limitations on the used PDF library.
A new type of navigation has been added to Google Chrome, namely Compact Navigation. By making the address bar optional and moving the wrench menu to the title-bar, Chrome’s user interface will now only be 30 pixels in height on Windows. While this would be ideal for pinned tabs and applications, it can cause serious security issues for secured websites as the displayed address is no longer visible.
Shishir Agrawal landed an initial version of the Web Performance’s latest specification: the Page Visibility API. The API allows developers to tune performance of their application based on whether the page (or, more commonly, tab) is visible, similar to how requestAnimationFrame stops working when the tab is hidden. While browsers such as Chrome and Firefox will increase the minimum interval for timers to about a second when a page doesn’t have focus, the API allows for more friendly approaches to be taken by the developer.
As for other specification related updates, the onchange event will now fire for radio-groups when the user changes selection through their keyboard. An issue in handling the currentColor value for SVG elements has been fixed, positioning of validation bubbles on non-text input elements has been corrected, an element’s onclick event won’t fire anymore if it got removed earlier on and the noresize attribute for frames can now be set via JavaScript. Finally, Dave Hyatt seems to start implementing the CSS3 Grid Layout Module!
Other changes which occurred last week:
The XSS Auditor doesn’t block all http-equiv meta-elements anymore.
The style sidebar in Web Inspector will now be updated based on changes in
the Resources Panel, including for free-flow text editing.
Throttling of the WebGL framerate has been made more accurate.
A minor update for the Media Streaming API: exceptions for getUserMedia.
Semi-transparent colors for an element’s outlines won’t overlap at the corners anymore.
Due to this addition, Chromium will be able to use DNS Prefetching again.
The path, build type and more additional information will now be shown in about:version
The Remoting host-component has been removed from Chromium, supposedly going to be a plugin.
Chromoting seems to have officially been renamed to Remoting now.
An option has been added to toggle the availability of background extensions.
Panels on Windows can now contain and display (themed) title bars.
Pop-ups will now properly be blocked when created in sandboxed iframes.
IndexedDB will no longer be visible within sandboxed iframes.
Error messages for the Application Cache will now show up in Web Inspector.
Following a series of patches, strict PassOwnPtr has now been enabled for Chromium.
A context-menu has been added to Chromium OS’ file browser.
Function constructors can now be blocked by Content-Security-Policy.
Touch Icons have been linked up to the Chromium post, though still no visible usage.
As a special comment, I’d like to thank RIM’s Eli Fidler for the great chats and demonstrating WebKit’s remote debugging capability of the PlayBook. Mostly thanks to Krijn, Peter-Paul and Stephen, I had a great time at Mobilism. If you’re into the mobile web, be sure to attend the event next year!
Today’s update addresses some of the changes among the 1,280 commits which were made last week. Since I haven’t had any time at all, it’s not as detailed as usual, but contains several highlights. The Shadow DOM is now visible through Web Inspector, quite some polishing is being done on Chrome OS’ file browser and new default avatars for Chrome OS’ landed.
Chrome OS’ file manager has been in development for quite a while now. It’s based on the FileSystem API, features a list of files and folders and a side-panel with additional information. With the final file-type icons now in place and some secret shortcuts, it looks like the feature is coming together nicely. Besides local storage, the manager will support USB drives, memory cards, network storage and possibly digital cameras.
As for WebKit’s specification related changes, fixed text-indents used for input placeholders will now be respected. JavaScript may now be used to set !important CSS rules, the document.innerHTML property has been added and the preload attribute for media elements is now implemented correctly for Safari.
Other things which occurred last week:
Support for Core Animation has been added to Chromium’s Cairo-renderer.
With lucky number 13 -Chromium’s current version- now available, version 12 has been branched. Last week’s 1,423 commits bring highlights such as Google Chrome Canary which will be coming to Mac OS X, a new CSS property prefix for the EPUB format and lots of removed code.
While it has not been released yet, Google does seem to be ready to release Google Chrome Canary for Mac OS X systems. The browser cannot be made the default browser through the preferences and the release monitor says that the latest version was released today, using the same revision as Windows’ Canary.
Web Inspector will now show hyperlink auditing requests in the network panel. Copying data from the Resources panel has been made easier, the option “Open link in new tab” has been added to several context menus and it’s now possible to follow retained paths in detailed heap snapshots.
Following discussion on both the mailing list and during the contributor meeting, support for WML (“Wireless Markup Language”) has been removed from WebKit. This was a logical step as only BlackBerry needs to continue to support WML, and are doing so through a proprietary plugin. Microsoft and Opera still support it. Other code removed includes the Image Resizer, support for datagrids and Android’s build system.
As for specification related updates, setting outerHTML on an element will now merge text nodes. The onchange event on text fields has been made more reliable, styling a speech input-button with paddings and borders has been improved and the root element will now establish a new block formatting context, and will therefore expand to enclose overhanging floats. Finally, the CSS sibling selector (~) now works properly with the :target pseudo-class.
WebKit now supports the -epub- CSS property-prefix as an alias, similar to its support for the -apple- and -khtml- prefixes. This addition was made following a conference call in the EPUB Working Group last Thursday, and while notall issues have been resolved yet, it’s likely that they’re here to stay. One thing which is surprising is the fact that all vendors will use the same prefix: -epub-, contrary to CSS’ vendor prefixes.
Averaging about 180 commits per day in the last month, this week’s commit count of 1,447 pushes the limit once again. Highlights include lots of border-rendering fixes, the WebRequest Extension API in Chromium, progress on Content Security Policy and lots of Web Inspector updates.
One project I should give more attention to is v8, the JavaScript engine used in Chromium, especially as some interesting developments have become apparent recently. Support for Float64Arrays has been added and work on EcmaScript’s Internationalization APIs continues with a partial implementation of the Collator. Did you know Chromium already exposes a Locale object as window.v8Locale?
Besides that, the first steps towards adding Harmony Proxieshave been made by exposing an experimental Proxy object, which can be enabled by running Chromium with –js-flags=”–harmony_proxies”. Do keep in mind that the implementation currently only exposes an empty, thus void, Proxy object.
WebKit’s implementation of the Content Security Policy draft received quite some improvements again. Policy violations will be logged to Web Inspector’s console, support for the frame-src directive has beenadded and the report-uri directive has been implemented, which will send a violation report to a chosen URL, albeit slightly different from the current draft specification. Finally, the policy definition syntax has been updated.
As for specification support, the disabled property of link elements handling stylesheets now matches the HTML5 specification. The error-event for <script> elements won’t bubble anymore and form control elements’ label property will allow custom attributes to be set.
WebKit’s border rendering now sucks less, as Simon Fraser puts it. He fixed several bugs by refactoring a lot of code and implementing optimizations for common cases, among which are overlapping semi-transparent borders, anti-aliasing for borders on transformed elements and rounded border rendering for different border styles, which has been improved. Background color leakage has been fixed, as has gradient leaking.
Other changes which occurred last week:
The LevelDB wrappers landed and will be compiled in for Android WebKit.
Incremental decoding for the WebP image format has been added.
The requestFileSystem method from the FileSystem API has been prefixed.
Folders may now be dragged to file inputs with the webkitdirectory attribute.
New resources have been added for Chromium OS’ profile photo displays.
Given the large amount of command line switches in Chromium, work is being done to move them to different files. This causes the command line overview to be incomplete right now, which I plan to fix this week 🙂
The Chromium and WebKit teams checked in a grand total of 1,496 changesets over the past 168 hours. Highlights include the availability for the Web Audio API on all platforms, script de-obfuscation in Web Inspector and a slightly updated user interface for Chrome 12.
Following the availability of the Web Audio API on Mac OS X, Kenneth Russell flipped the switch for branded Windows builds, after which Chris Rogers landed a patch making it work on Linux. If you’re on Windows, get yourself a Chrome Canary build, launch it with the “–enable-webaudio” flag and check out some examples! The commit has been reverted, but work is on its way to get the API back in.
The Web Inspector team has made some great commits again. Firstly, obfuscated source-code (such as a minimized jQuery) may now be cleaned up in the Script Panel by right-clicking on the content and selecting the de-obfuscate option. Undo and redo has been implemented for the text editor, accidentally switching panels during live editing using certain shortcuts has been fixed and the resources panel can now display raw HTTP-headers. Finally, early steps have been taken to move the Detailed Heap Snapshots processing into workers.
One of the problems the prefetch relation for <link>-elements has, is that the linked file will be loaded in WebKit at a very low priority. In order to offer authors a way to preload resources which will be used on the current page, Gavin Peters has implemented the “subresource” relation.
As for specification compliance, a regression related to the ACID3 test has been fixed meaning that it will render pixel-perfect again. The Blob’s slice method has been renamed to Blob.webkitSlice, while also having its semantics change to mimic Array.slice. Simon Fraser has begun with improving WebKit’s border mechanisms, initially by improving the logic used to compute the inner radii on curved borders. Stay tuned..
WebKit’s Content-Security-Policy is now aware of the “self” source and will block string arguments to setTimeout and setInterval unless the “eval-script” option has been set, as they would evaluate the string internally. It is now also possible to define what sources media elements can load from, using the media-src directive.
The 630 commits at WebKit and 707 commits at Chromium add up to a total of 1,337 commits. And I’m not evenkidding. Highlights are two removed events, automated ruby overhang behavior and offline audio rendering for the Web Audio API.
Quite some visual changes have been made to Chromium. The concept of scrolling tabs has been introduced for the Touch UI, ensuring that selected tabs stay in the view. Users of Side Tabs will have noticed two new arrows at the top of the tab-bar, allowing you to scroll through the tabs upwards and downwards. The profile button has been moved a bit, making space for a new full-screen button and a stub implementation has been added for Panels, one thing I really miss for extensions.
New features have been given quite some attention. Feature defines have been added for an implementation of the <track> element, which means that work will be starting. The getUserMedia method and JavaScript bindings have been implemented for the Media Stream API and WebKit is now capable of rendering fonts using Skia, bringing its PDF rendering one step closer to handling Chrome’s print previews.
Dan Bernstein had a go at improving WebKit’s ruby implementation by adding support automated overhang, which means that ruby text can overhang characters adjacent to the base text. While this has become the default and only behavior for WebKit, as the ruby-overhang CSS property has not been implemented yet, the specification’s draft does not reflect the new initial value yet.
Now that the Web Audio API has been in development for well over a year, work has begun on making it testable. Offline audio rendering has been added to the AudioContext API and DumpRenderTree (the testing-framework) for WebKit’s Mac port has been improved with supporting audio tests.
Other changes which occurred last week:
WebKit’s GTK port is now capable of running WebGL!
Spin-buttons for numeric input elements are clickable again when large paddings are used.
A WebUI implementation for HTTP Authentication dialogs has landed for Chromium OS.
The default favicon to show for websites has been changed to the address bar’s little globe.
Tabs on Chromium’s Touch UI tab-bar will be using 32×32 pixel favicons, double their normale size.
TCP-classes have been renamed to Transport in scope of unifying APIs for TCP, UDP and SCTP protocols.
Dragging multiple tabs in Chromium will now show an accurate thumbnail showing all tabs.
Just pre-loading the metadata for video elements can now be done by setting preload=metadata.
And that’s it again. If you hadn’t noticed yet, last Tuesday I announced that I’ll be joining the Google Chrome team in June. While the set-up of these updates may change, I definitely intend to continue making them!
I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be joining Google as a Software Engineer on the Google Chrome team!
Starting mid June, I’ll be working with the guys over at Google London to improve the browser, WebKit and related products. As my passion for both Google Chrome and WebKit has become quite obvious over the past year, I can’t wait to get started on my new position. Since I’m currently living in the Netherlands, this also means that I’ll be moving to London and the United Kingdom.
While this is an amazing opportunity that I’m definitely looking forward to, there’s a lot I have to leave behind. Besides friends and family, I will no longer be the Technical Director at videobankonline, a great company I co-founded. While I can no longer be an active volunteer at Fronteers, the association for Dutch front-end developers, I’ll finish my role in this year’s conference’s committee and will host an HTML5-course in May.
I certainly intend to continue writing last week posts on my blog, but the set up is going to change. Right now I have the liberty to write about anything I find, seeing that I don’t have access to internal information. As this is going to change, I’ll have to be a lot more careful about the things I write about.
1,403 new patches have been introduced to the Chromium and WebKit repositories in the last week, among which were results of the WebKit BiDi-sprint, free-flow CSS editing and SMS notifications for Chromium OS.
More work has been done on the multiple-profile implementation for Chromium, resulting in visual results for Mac users now as well. The button is quite different from the early mock-ups shown in November, but definitely looks neat and uses less space than the original version.
Quite some patches were submitted to WebKit as part of the announced BiDi-sprint. The <title>-element now supports the dir attribute, moving the caret by word will now occur in visual order when editing text and BiDi-rendering for SVG Text has been improved. Furthermore, the text-align CSS property can now handlematch-parent and the valuesisolate and plaintext can now be parsed for the unicode-bidi property, all prefixed.
Web Inspector now supports free-flow text editing for CSS files! This is a major usability improvement, as it means that making larger modification will be a lot easier. The feature is already available in Google Canary and Chromium nightlies. Just go to the Resources Panel, select a CSS file and double click on its contents to start editing. Committing the changes may be done via Cmd/Ctrl+S.
Many other fixes landed as well for Web Inspector. Changing the value of a hexadecimal number will now be treated correctly, as will a console message’s position for formatted scripts. Furthermore, property abbreviation has been disabled and the periods at the end of error messages have been removed.
In light of improving spec alignment, the behavior of the “start” and “end” values for the text-align property has been updated to match other browsers. DOM bindings have been implemented for the ping attribute on anchor tags and the noresize attribute on frames may now be set using JavaScript. Finally, the sizes of H1-elements nested in HTML5 sectioning elements will now be determined based on their depth.
With 1,116 commits, 522 for WebKit and 594 for Chromium, there have been quite a lot of changes again. More progress has been made for Chromium OS’ touch support, a new CSS selector has been implemented, as well as the line-box-contain CSS property.
Dave Hyatt proposed and implemented a new CSS property for WebKit: line-box-contain. The property addresses cases in which text on the first line will be shown in a larger size than the rest of the line, causing the line-height to change. The prefixed version is already available in WebKit and Chromium nightlies!
As for other specification-related changes, more work has been done to improve percentage rounding. XMLHttpRequest will now properly set the referrer when Web Workers are being used and some more CSS 2.1 counter-related tests will now pass. The onchange-event will not fire anymore when a text field’s contents have not changed.
An implementation for asynchronous communication between a Pepper Plugin and JavaScript landed.
HTTP throttling may now be disabled via a new tab on the about:net-internals page.
A raw video pipeline has been added for the <video> element, with a specialized protocol: media://.
A simplified normal flow layout path optimization for overflow recomputation and for positioned objects inside relatively positioned containers has been added.
WebGL will now always be exposed to the DOM, even if it has been disabled.
Google Gears has now been removed from WebKit as well, of course in favor of HTML5.
Web Inspector will now show the correct transfer size for compressed resources.
