Another busy week has passed with 673 commits to WebKit’s repository and 637 to Chromium’s, totaling up to 1,310 changes. Highlights include the availability of a method to get cryptographically strong pseudo-random numbers and more CSS Style Selector performance improvements.
The Google Web Search team just launched an extension which allows you to block websites from appearing in the search results. Using it won’t just improve the accuracy locally, but it’ll also share your blocked sites with Google. Eventually it may influence a website’s ranking, thus improving search quality as a whole.
The Web Inspector team landed quite some patches last week. Double clicking on an entry in the Network Panel will now open the resource in a new tab, full reloads (thus bypassing the cache) may be done by pressing <Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + R> within the Inspector and traversing between suggested values without entering anything is a possibility now as well. Finally, support for the File System View has been removed.
Following quite some discussion, Adam Barth announced he landed support for a cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generator. The feature is available as the window.crypto.getRandomValues method and can fill any integer-based Array Buffer with random values. Meanwhile, Brandan Eich expressed the intention to standardize a better random number generator at the EcmaScript level.
As for specification related changes, Adam Barth checked in a change which enables the Array Buffer objects, such as Float32Array, by default for every project using WebKit and the getComputedStyle method will now return the computed values for margins. Inset shadows with large offsets will now render correctly, as will repeated gradients and the ShadowBlur class has been taught how to tile inset shadows.
As for experimental features, part of a prototype implementation of the proposed LocaleInfo API in EcmaScript landed as a V8 extension in WebKit. The API aims to provide a consistent, rich internationalization API for doing anything from formatting currencies to getting information about the used region and calendar.
Antti Koivisto taught the CSS Style Selector to skip over sibling selectors and faster sorting, which bring some minor improvements, after which he landed two more awesome patches: one which enables ancestor identifier filtering for tree building, halving the remaining time in style matching over a typical page load, and a fast path for simple selectors that speed up matching up another 50% on some websites.
Other changes which occurred last week include:
The recent work on WebKit’s XSS Filter will be available on Chrome’s dev-channel shortly.
Support for PCRE Regular Expressions has been removed from WebKit entirely.
The about: URLs will now be auto-completed in Chromium, even if you never visited them before.
The filesystem: protocol has been implemented for usage with the File System API.
The clear method for IndexedDB’s IDBObjectStore has been implemented.
IndexedDB Cursors will now skip entries which have been deleted since the cursor was opened.
Link pre-rendering progressnicely continues. I added a few <link> elements on peter.sh as an experiment.
And that’s all again for this week. If you’re interested in web specifications as well, the W3C announced it extended the HTML Working Charter, together with a renewed timeline for HTML5: Last Call in May, to be followed by the Recommendation status in 2014.
With Chromium and WebKit totalling at 1.372 commits in the last week, it certainly has been a busy one. Highlights include unspoofable information bars for Chromium, impressive CSS performance improvements for descendant selectors and the first signs of Web Inspector’s API for Chromium extensions.
The XSS Filter was taught two new tricks by Adam Barth last week: dealing withjavascript:anddata: URLs. Performance was improved by skipping seemingly innocent pages, as well as by using a suffix tree, and websites can opt-out using the X-XSS-Protection header again. The filter replaces the XSS Auditor, which has been removed.
The reason descendant selectors are considered “bad” is that browser implementations have sucked. There is nothing inherently wrong with them.
Yesterday, he improved style matching by another 30% for websites using a lot of descendant selectors by switching the implementation to a Bloom Filter. Finally, Antti also fixed the adjacent sibling and :last-child:after selectors.
Great news for people who have an urge to extend Web Inspector: first drafts of the Web Inspector Audit, Inspected Window, Panel and Resources APIs are now available! While the APIs themselves have not been exposed to extensions yet, progress on this subject most definitely is a good thing. It may even indicate that we’ll be able to welcome Page Speed for Chrome not too long from now.
As for specification related updates, WebKit’s implementation of the -webkit-text-combine property is now complete. The background-clip property is now part of the background shorthand-property and CSS counters in anonymous renderers (e.g. for :before) now work properly.
Finally, the subset method for Typed Arrays has been renamed to subarray, asynchronous event handlers will be suspended when a modal dialog is being shown and Google has started on implementing media statistics.
Other changes last week include:
Reflections can now also be rendered through Chromium’s accelerated compositing path.
The frames in Web Inspector’s Resources panel will now remain visible after a refresh again.
A combined total of almost 1300 changes have made it a busy week for the Chromium and WebKit projects, with highlights such as work on two Chromium Extension APIs, a new XSS Filter and lots of work on shadows.
The Chromium team increased Chrome’s major version to 11. Google Chrome 10 will be using branch 648, which represents all WebKit commits up to r76408. Do keep in mind that important fixes will be merged with the branch, so these numbers aren’t entirely accurate.
As usual, there have been a number of changes in Web Inspector as well. In-line JavaScript and CSS content in HTML source-code will now be syntax highlighted and the render performance of the network panel has been improved. Exporting entries from the network panel to the HTTP Archive format will now copy the data to your clipboard, instead of downloading it to a random file.
While it’s already known that Web Inspector supports remote debugging, the front-end may now also be served from the cloud. No hints on the cloud itself yet, though. The first part of detailed heap snapshots landed as well, which will eventually enable you to more accurately trace down memory leaks by having access to a snapshot of each individual object in the JavaScript VM.
In terms of security, Adam Barth’s latest project is a new design for WebKit’s XSS filter. Rather than watching scripts as they execute, the tokens emitted by the HTML tokenizer will be analyzed. So far, the filter has been taught about processing the <script>, <object> and <embed>, <applet>, and the <meta> and <base> elements. A message will be added to Web Inspector’s console if anything gets blocked.
There has been lots of specification-related activity as well this week. The perspective property from the CSS 3D Transforms module now accepts lengths rather than a number, range and number inputs will reject event-based changes if they’re declared disabled or readonly and checkValidity will now return the correct result if an invalid event got cancelled.
Dave Hyatt continued his work on supporting vertical text, and landed a change which adds support for vertical text in multiple column layouts. Changing the unicode-bidi property will force a re-layout, as will changing font-sizes when the em-unit is used in a gradient.
Last week brought 649 commits to the Chromium repository, and 575 to the WebKit one. Among the changes are support for auto incrementing keys for IndexedDB and interactive validation which will now be available by default in Chromium. The Web Inspector team has been active again as well!
After a few weeks of behind-the-scenes work, Web Inspector has received some very interesting updates again. Following auto-completion for properties, many values will now be suggested and completed for you as well. The heap snapshot table may be sorted again, CPU profiles will survive refreshes and using the console.trace method won’t cause a crash anymore. Web Inspector has also been taughtapplication/x-font-woff as a valid MIME type for WOFF fonts.
Furthermore, a change has been committed which is a first step in supporting breakpoints on arbitrary positions on a line, which would be convenient for compressed scripts. Additionally, UglifyJS will be assisting in that as well, considering it’ll be included with WebKit in preparation for a script beautifier feature!
There have been quite a few specification-related updates this week as well. Interactive Validation has been enabled by default for Chromium, color changes in <select multiple> will be visible immediately and clipping backgrounds to the content-box now is a possibility. Furthermore, keygen elements won’t identify themselves any more as select elements. Mozilla’s requestAnimationFrame has been implemented, including on the Chromium side.
As for HTML5, two new form-related events have been implemented: onformchange and onforminput. Per the request of Jeremy Keith, datalist elements will be visible by default again, and uncaught JavaScript exceptions will now trigger the onerror event on the window object.
One performance-related change by Stephen White is the implementation of accelerated path drawing and clipping for the 2D Canvas GPU-path, done using a simple curve interpolator and the GLU tesselator. It speeds up Microsoft’s Galactic demo by three to five times —quite impressive.
Other changes from last week include:
More efficient, in-browser thumbnail generation is now available via a command line flag.
The –remoting flag and setting in about:flags are now available for all platforms.
Basic printing routines have been implemented in the WebKit2 API.
Some revalidation checks have been removed from the pre-rendering conditionals.
The languages and spell-check pages are now available in the DOMUI Settings for Chromium.
Style sharing optimizations have been improved, with 25-40% of the styles being shared.
An onBeforeRetarget callback has been introduced to the Web Navigation Extension API.
Password input fields will now show a warning when caps-lock is enabled, on GTK WebKit.
The -webkit-mask-* CSS properties can now be rendered using accelerated compositing.
And that’d be all again! Be sure to have a peek at this week’s update on the WHATWG blog, with topics like a proposal for XSS mitigation in browsers and a Change Proposal for a muted attribute for media elements.
With 1,134 commits in the last week, development certainly is getting back on track after the holidays. This week’s highlights include some plans for improving the CSSOM, implementation plans for CSS Variables and the landing of Interactive Validation within WebKit. I won’t address H.264. Enough people have done that.
If you’re interested in updates related to HTML, Anne van Kesteren published an item on recent changes happening around the WHATWG. The article mostly covers discussions which took place on the whatwg@whatwg.org mailing list, and certainly is an interesting read!
Tab Atkins, member of the CSS Working Group and the Google Chrome team, has published the slides of a presentation he hosted last Wednesday. It talks about how the CSSOM, the interface between JavaScript and CSS, basically sucks. The presentation demonstrates four relatively new concepts:
CSS Variables
By declaring a variable through the @var rule, its type and the value, anything from colors to lengths, rotations and functions can be defined and will be available to all CSS used in the document. Support for local variables will be available as well, through the @local at-rule.
@var petersh-paragraph-size length 12px;
@var petersh-paragraph-color color rgba(0,0,0,0);
p { . color: var(petersh-paragraph-color); . font-size: var(petersh-paragraph-size);
}
CSS Mixins
Mixins come down to being able to extend any rule with certain, common properties. They take parameters similarly to CSS Variables, including the ability to have default values for them.
CSS Nesting
Nesting in CSS, especially when used without classes or IDs, can be a pain. The @this at-rule will be introduced for usage in CSS rules. The selector you supply behind it will apply only to descendants of elements matched by the current rule. That clears the way for structures like this:
CSS Modules
No, not the CSS Modules which make up CSS Level 3. CSS Modules basically are namespaces for CSS Variables and Mixins. Mixins and variables can still be referred to by prepending their name with the namespace’s name, or by including the @use at-rule to have the parser include all of them.
While the idea is fine, I personally think this shouldn’t be part of the specification. The use-case is easily obtainable by advocating authors to prefix their variable names, like “petersh-header-color” instead of “header-color”. Two types of namespacing, sharing similar syntax, is just going to cause confusion.
While the current code is only available on a few machines in Sydney, Google is planning to publish an initial specification this quarter, and implement the changes before the end of the year. Considering neither these plans for CSS Variables nor the CSS Mixins and Nesting have been shared on the www-style mailing list yet, it’ll be interesting to see how it will be received by other vendors. Related discussion from a few years ago has shown that it’s a fairly controversial issue, with many opinions being far apart.
Last Thursday, Kent Tamura landed support for the Interactive Validation UI using the new Shadow DOMmodel. With most bugs out of the way, messages and an –albeit internal– API being available for Chromium to enable the feature, it won’t be long before it becomes available in the nightlies.
In other specification-related news, the scroll event will now be fired asynchronously. The WebKitCSSMatrix object in the DOM now acceptsnone as a valid keyword, and using the toDataURL method for a canvas on Chromium will now composite onto a black surface when the destination format does not support an alpha channel.
Other changes which happened last week:
Tony Gentilcore now is a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
Adam Barth is working on a proposal for embedding a security policy in an HTML document.
He also announced to have finished moving WebKit’s source files to a separate directory.
The about:sync page has been updated to use the new DOM UI displaying system.
The media player from WebKit’s GTK port now features a slider to change the volume.
Simon Fraser wrote an excellent article on his CSS3 Gradients implementation.
Support for dropping data to WebKit2 has been implemented for Mac OS systems.
Password synchronization has been enabled by default for Google Chrome.
Some issues with Safari’s strict mode implementations have been fixed.
The security model used chrome://-URLs has been updated, as described in this message.
Development is slowly getting back on track with the 851 commits which were done last week. This week’s highlights include the availability of a per element JavaScript full screen API, a prefixless Navigation Timing implementation and the addition of support for repeating CSS gradients.
With both Microsoft and Google strongly pushing the Navigation Timing specification, both vendors finished most of their implementation and a Last Call specification will be published tomorrow. Because of this, WebKit has dropped the vendor prefix and Microsoft is very likely to do the same. Opera and Mozilla have expressedconcerns, but seem supportive as well. It’ll certainly become an interesting Last Call phase.
As for other specification-related changes, text emphasis marks won’t appear over characters that have ruby annotations anymore. Support for repeating gradients has been added as well, completing the set of gradient related CSS properties. Negated selectors will be given the specificity of the selector they’re negating, and parsing of the argument for the :nth-child CSS selector has been updated and now accepts whitespace, but rejects invalid values.
...
var elem = document.getElementById("my-element");
elem.onwebkitfullscreenchange = function () {
console.log ("We went fullscreen!");
};
elem.webkitRequestFullScreen ();
..
After several months of writing and updating patches, Jer Noble landed the final part of his work on supporting per-element full screen last Friday. While the implementation is only available in WebKit nightlies on Mac OS systems so far, I’d expect a Windows nightly rather soon and Chromium is interested as well.
WebKit’s implementation follows Mozilla’s proposal with only a few exceptions: instead of accepting flags for requestFullScreen, an additional method called requestFullScreenWithKeys has been made available. The following three methods have been added for the Document and all Elements in the DOM:
void webkitRequestFullScreen();
void webkitRequestFullScreenWithKeys();
void webkitCancelFullScreen(); // only on Document
Furthermore, a new attribute called allowFullScreen has been introduced for iframe elements, the fullScreenChange event has been added and three CSS pseudo-classes have been added, namely :full-screen, :full-screen-doc and :full-screen-root-with-target. Mind that each of these additions has been prefixed with “webkit” or “-webkit-“, depending on the context.
Want to try the feature yourself? All you need is a Mac OS X system on which you can run WebKit nightlies. Download and install the latest one and open up Terminal. Within it, execute the following command to enable the feature:
After (re)starting the nightly, the exposed API will actually launch an element in full screen. Click on the icon to the left of this paragraph to display this very article in full screen. Using it to display a single element in full screen can be done too, but still is a bit unstable at the time of writing.
Other changes which occurred last week:
The disabled property on stylesheet elements will now disable the sheet altogether.
Adam Barth moved the WebCore directory, containing most of WebKit’s code, to Source.
A memory sampler has been added to WebKit, primarily for usage in Safari on Mac OS X.
The onbeforeunload event is now available for framesets as well.
SGML-style comments within <style> elements will now be ignored when using XHTML.
Tabbed options (also known as WebUI) have been enabled by default in Chromium.
Per an update in the HTML5 specification, framesets will now be allowed after hidden inputs.
The Web Audio API received some more work for the Chromium port.
Mihai Parparita now is a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
The PNG compression settings for Chromium have been optimized for performance.
Inline script execution will now block on pending stylesheet loads, as other browsers do.
The O3D Plugin API will now work with Opera 11 as well.
Web Inspector has been enabled for all internal chrome:// pages.
The icon for active background extensions over the wrench menu in Chrome has been updated.
The position of Notifications can now be changed via a notification’s option menu.
This week might bring four times faster JavaScript to Samsung’s EFL port, support for the object-fit CSS property and, hopefully, much more patches from the Web Inspector team. Have a good week!
Happy New Year! Even though there were only 354 commits in total, there certainly were some interesting subjects to write about. Highlights include cleaner gradient syntax for WebKit, support for the :in-range and :out-of-range CSS Selectors and background extensions enabled by default.
There are two things which I’ll change with the weekly updates, starting at this article. Firstly, I’m no longer forcing external links to open up in new tabs/windows: clicking them will navigate away from the article. Furthermore, I have added tags indicating the latest Chromium version at the time of publishing, making it easier to determine what changed in a major Chrome release: version 7, 8, 9 and the latest: Chrome 10.
Following Tab Atkins’ promise that the gradient part of the CSS3 Images specification won’t change anymore, Simon Fraser was quick to jump in and implement the gradient syntax in WebKit. This is good news for the cutting-edge developer, as WebKit’s own proprietary syntax won’t be nessesary anymore in the near feature.
So far, two patches for supporting the new gradient syntax have landed. The first one implements the syntax for non-repeating linear gradients, including support for non-percent based and negative lengths. The second patch adds support for radial gradients through the -webkit-radial-gradient property, which includes shapes and sizing for the ellipse. Mind that only circular ellipses are supported for now.
Hopefully the new CSS3 Images module will be published as a Working Draft soon, as Tab Atkins is intending to request it. The new draft introduces the ability to use elements as backgrounds, as well as a more convenient way of cross fading background images.
The Web Inspector team didn’t seem to care about the New Year either and landed various patches. The protocol has been cleaned up and was enriched with Network, DOM Storage and Database domains. Disabled style properties get enabled when they’re edited and pasting a full property declaration will now split it up in a property and value automatically.
Other changes in this week include:
Support for HTML5’s :in-range and :out-of-range CSS selectors has been added.
Viewing the source of a pinned/app window won’t clone the tab’s state anymore.
The JSON.parse method in JavaScriptCore now properly exists as a function taking two parameters.
With the addition of the Surface3D class, the Pepper3D API is now complete, but not fully functional yet.
JavaScriptCore now recognizes vertical tabs and form feeds as valid JSON whitespace characters.
Accidental white-space for Chromium OS usernames will now be removed.
Sandboxed iframes no longer have access to the top.history methods.
Periods in Google Apps account names won’t be ignored anymore in Chromium OS.
WebKit’s client-based GeoLocation has been enabled for Chromium.
Background extensions have been enabled for all platforms, except for Chromium OS.
Submitting forms using the GET method to the current location as its action won’t reload the page.
Where my first day of work in 2011 has already passed, yours might just be beginning. See you next week!
With just 347 commits at WebKit, and 433 at Chromium, activity indeed has been down a bit. Nevertheless, there have been some interesting changes, including spatialization resources and Strict Mode fixes for Safari.
Matrices have been given some love within WebKit, with two more methods for the CSSMatrix class: skewX and skewY. Both normal 2D matrices and 3D matrices will now take the page’s zoom factor in account, and some additional tests have been added to ensure that behavior on CSSMatrix as well.
Specification support has been given quite some attention again. JavaScriptCore, the JavaScript engine used by Safari, no longer allows you to delete variables, functions or arguments per ECMAScript 5’s Strict Mode. Defining multiple font families for a CSS @font-face rule will discard the rule. The box-shadow property no longer requires a prefix, although -webkit-box-shadow remains available for non-standard blur radiuses.
Within Web Inspector, work is well on its way to support auto-completion for a property’s values. There still are some patches which need to be updated before the feature can be implemented, but the forecast is rather good. Meanwhile, Chris Rogers added spatialization resource files for the Web Audio API and landed an AudioBus for Chromium, bringing wider support for the API a step closer.
Other changes last week include:
Borders with non-opaque alpha colors won’t break gradients anymore for Chromium.
Support for listening sockets was added for Chromium, used for Cloud Print, Remoting and Automation.
Five new commands have been implemented in Chromium’s Web Driver, for tracking a page’s elements.
V8’s implementation of window.open has been moved to WebKit’s common one.
The initial state for HTML5’s interactive validation on <select required> elements has been fixed.
Rendering and script execution won’t block anymore on deferred stylesheets.
Ryosuke Niwa has joined WebKit’s reviewers team, congratulations!
Chromium’s timeline in media controls can now deal with widths less than 240 pixels.
The performance of Chromium’s toDataURL for canvasses has been improved by 3 times.
The root layer of a composited page will now be tiled as well.
Some major directory reorganization work is underway within WebKit: don’t get lost!
Considering this year only counts four more days, I don’t think this week will bring much surprises, even though there are some interesting patches pending. Have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy New Year!
With 611 commits to the Chromium repository last week, and 449 commits to the WebKit one, my guess is that last week was the last week this year with more than a thousand changes. Highlights include support for the text-emphasis property and Web Inspector’s style editing panes, which now support Firebug-like editing.
Good news for fans of Firebug: editing CSS properties in Web Inspector will now be done with separate fields for the property’s name and value. Using the arrow keys to increment or decrement a numeric value will cause immediate changes again. Furthermore, some more work was done on the Extension API. Specifically, support was added for adding and overriding HTTP request headers.
As for specification related changes, the endedPlayback property for HTML5 media elements won’t return true anymore if the media file couldn’t be loaded. The -webkit-appearance property no longer accepts the value caps-lock-indicator and the delete method for IndexedDB Cursors has been added.
Work on two text-related CSS properties has continued as well. Firstly, Dan Bernstein has been working on the text-emphasis property, the final part of which landed last Friday. This property allows you to include small symbols next to the text, which Eastern Asian documents may use to emphasize the run of the text. Takumi Takano updated the values for text-combine to match the current CSS proposal.
Other changes last week include:
Kenneth Russell ported the Web Audio API’s FFTFrame implementation to MKL.
Stylesheets defined under the “print” media will now be downloaded with a lowered priority.
Chromium OS now also reports to accept the language “en”, following the Chromium browser.
Chrome Frame will now ignore IE’s conditional comment tags when parsing a HTML stream.
Since the next article will take another seven days: Merry Christmas! I’m going to spend my time with family, so expect next week’s post to be rather short. However, I probably won’t be the only one. Enjoy!
Even though there were just 1016 commits in the last seven days, the announcements from the Chrome team have certainly made it interesting. This week’s highlights include Crankshaft, extensive documentation for Web Inspector and quite some updates on specification support.
Tuesday, Google’s Sundar Pichai went on stage to make some announcements around the Chromium project. While it was rather obvious that the Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS would be announced, I did not expect free laptops for reviewing purposes to be given away. Neither did I expect the Crankshaft update to the V8 JavaScript engine, which significantly improves performance. Since I’m sure you’ve read most of it, I’ll just give a quick recap:
The V8 team has introduced Crankshaft which uses adaptive compiling to focus optimizations on the areas that need it. It’s available on the Canary channel already.
Chrome OS’ development has entered the stage at which it needs feedback from end-users. People living in the United States can apply for a notebook in the Pilot program.
The Chrome Web Store has been launched! Already filled with a wide range of applications, it can strongly increase the capabilities of your browser.
The Google Chrome Developer Tools, or simply Web Inspector, is quite an extensive piece of software. Almost every developer will be familiar with the main screen: a clear overview of the elements available on the page and the CSS rules associated with them. But not everyone is aware that you can expand the Properties pane in the sidebar to see all the DOM properties, let alone the possibility to profile your JavaScript’s CPU usage, create memory heap snapshots or list the cookies which were sent when downloading an image.
In terms of improved standards support, the marquee element will now stop scrolling if scrollAmount has been set to zero. The object element now is an associated form element. Furthermore, I’ve updated Maciej Stachowiak’s patch which allowed support for the HTML5 hidden attribute to land (despite my earlier thoughts) and added the default CSS definitions for the <figure> and <figcaption> elements, completing support. Dai Mikurube added support for the required attribute on the select element.
Other changes include:
Web Inspector is now usable with the WebKit2 API on Windows.
Pasted text will now be checked for spelling errors in Chromium as well.
Layout flow for involving transforms in scrolling has been refactored.
The border-radius property can now be used for CSS Animations.
Spatial navigation is now available for map and area elements too.
Some progress on implementing the search function in Chrome’s Web UI.
Transitioning multiple shadows should now be working correctly again.
Support for the validation API for <object> and <keygen> elements was improved.
James Robinson fixed the blurred text issue on large accelerated layers!
Reflected unsigned attributes in IDL files will now be trimmed to [0, 2^31].
Chromium is on its way to switch their libjpeg implementation to libjpeg-turbo.
A quick patch has landed to solve the infinite redirects on developer.apple.com pages.
The WebKit GTK port has landed support for the viewport meta-tag.
The Input Speech API will now be available by default on Chrome’s dev-channel.
And that’s it again. This week has been a bit Chromium-y due to the announcements, I’ll give WebKit a bit more attention next week again! I’m on stage right at this very moment giving a talk about the Audio APIs, I’ll certainly write some more articles on that in the near future as well!
After (re)starting the nightly, the exposed API will actually launch an element in full screen. Click on the icon to the left of this paragraph to display this very article in full screen. Using it to display 
Tuesday, Google’s Sundar Pichai went on stage to make some 
