With the commit count being up 52 percent compared to last week, totaling 1,184 commits, activity has been a lot higher than two weeks ago. Highlights include Google Chrome 8, tomorrow’s announcement and lots of updates to standard support.
Exactly six weeks and over 8,472 commits after the release of Google Chrome 7, Google has updated the Stable channel to the 8th version of their browser. This release brings support for Element.classList, asynchronous script loading, support for the steps timing-function for transitions, the about:flags page and hyperlink auditing, enabled by default.
As a quick peek-ahead towards a feature for Google Chrome that’s currently scheduled for version 9, which would be around mid January: Google Cloud Printing. The idea is simple: connect your printer with GCP and you’ll be able to print to it from any computer or smart phone, regardless of where you are. Probably unrelated: an event will be happening in San Francisco tomorrow morning sharing some exciting news about Google Chrome. While I have a fair idea what it will be about, there is little point in morespeculation.
WebKit has taken a huge leap forward in terms of support for various standards. ArrayBuffers may now be transmitted using XMLHttpRequest’s send-method, a form’s elements property now includes fieldset and keygen elements, getBoundingClientRect won’t truncate the coordinates to integers anymore and focussed <area> elements will no longer use the image’s focus-styles.
An <input type=color> will no longer accept named colors and the incremental property is now available on the DOM of all input elements. The toDataURL method of a canvas’ context in Chromium can now export the image as a JPEG, the marquee element’s properties have been updated per the HTML5 specification (besides the events) and, while they don’t have visual effects yet, support for the four text-emphasis properties from the CSS3 Text module was added.
Finally, support for both lower and upper Armenian list style types has been implemented and initial versions of the HTML5 <details> and <summary> elements have been added by Luiz Agostini. Even though they aren’t interactive yet, work has started!
Other interesting changes which occurred last week:
Option elements will not be bold anymore for certain Chromium versions.
The about:flags page will now show a drop-down for items where multiple values are possible.
Hyperlink auditing (<a ping>) may now be disabled via the about:flags page.
No, of course I didn’t forget Web Inspector. The “revert to revision” system has been implemented for the revision-system in the Resources panel. The display name of an object will now equal its constructor rather than its type, copy(node) in the Console works again, the cookies tab for a Network resource will only show for Chromium, and, finally, the Inspector protocol has been cleaned up.
As already mentioned earlier in the post, the Google Chrome team scheduled an announcement for tomorrow. Be sure to keep an eye out for news and updates, I’ll certainly devote some tweets to the announcement!
With only 777 commits, this week has been rather calm in terms of changes to the repositories. Nevertheless, there have been some interesting changes to both projects, and lots of ongoing work of course.
Even though WebKit only received 281 commits last week, in one of the changes Luiz Agostini landed support for the matchMedia method from the CSSOM View module. The method adds support for event-based Media Queries to JavaScript. This allows you to detect, for example, changes in the orientation of a visitor’s display:
On top of the default media queries specified in the specification, WebKit also supports “-webkit-view-mode”. Using that query together with the matchMedia method allows you to detect whether a WebKit instance is windowed, floating, minimized or maximized. Unfortunately these features are not yet available for Chromium.
Other specification related changes include that usage of percentage values for transform origins on the z-axis will now invalidate the entire property. Furthermore, the DataView interface from WebGL’s Typed Array specification has been implemented.
Even though I have known about the feature for a while now (and briefly tweeted about it), there wasn’t really a lot to say yet. That has changed now that new mock-ups on chromium.org are available: I’ll quickly sum up the multiple profile feature Chrome will be getting.
There will be two types of profiles: limited profiles and profiles based on Google accounts. The former will only be available on the current computer, while profiles based on Google accounts have the ability to synchronize their settings/bookmarks and may be used to access the Chrome Web Store.
Switching to another account will require you to enter the password in order to properly log in. Multiple browser windows may use different profiles, and each profile can use its own Incognito Mode.
Each profile can have a shortcut on your desktop, showing a little avatar in the bottom-right corner.
While there is no known date on which these features should be finished, it’s currently aimed for Milestone 10. This means that it might be hitting the stable channel around late February next year.
The Web Inspector team has been busy again with their effort to provide developers with a complete set of tools for efficient developing. The latestaddition is support for locally modified files, including the ability to see the added, changed or removed lines inline in the file’s content view. While these features haven’t been finished yet, they certainly are worth looking forward to.
The Inspector’s Network panel now shows a Timing-tab for individual resources, showing a graphed overview of loading times. The interfaces of the Network and Resources panels have been polished, and work has started on showing highlighted differences between a file’s revisions.
Other changes to the projects last week:
After using speech-input, the onspeechchange event will now be fired.
Outside list-bullets will no longer ignore text alignment within the item.
WebKit’s XMLHttpRequest object now has two new properties: response and responseType.
TimeComposer has added support for one and two-digit millisecond values for date parsing.
Web Inspector’s ResourceView has been abstracted as more types of resources arise.
Capitalization for the “Check for update” menu-item has been fixed to meet Google’s sentence standards.
Chromium’s compositor has been updated with a texture manager to manage the amount of VRAM usage.
Synchronous support for the File Writer API has been added, with a Chromium-implementation as well.
An issue in the Yarr Regular Expressions engine has been solved in WebKit, pending in Mozilla Firefox.
Internally WebKit’s CSS Parser has been taught the correct spelling of “hertz”.
Displaying of suggested results in the omnibox through Google Instant is now available for Mac OS X.
An exponential back-off system has been implemented, preventing Chrome from causing DDoS attacks.
Part of Chrome’s side for HTML5’s interactive validation has landed, validation messages for forms.
Acer’s Jeff Fang seems to by busy porting Chrome to a limited memory device.
Next week branching for Google Chrome 9 will occur, and I’m expecting more work on Web Inspector’s revision system to be completed. See you next Monday!
Last week the projects received another 1,126 commits, 615 for Chromium and 511 for WebKit. Some highlights include updated Terms of Service and the removal of the CSS Variables code.
To start off with improved standards support, the stepUp and stepDown API methods for certain input elements have been updated to match the specification in case step-mismatching occurs. The unloadEventStart property has been added for the Web Timing implementation.
In scope of the Web Audio API, event hooks were added for JavaScript Audio Nodes, as well as custom bindings for AudioNode. More work has been completed on vertical text as well: support for vertical text in ruby was enhanced and fonts with no vertical metrics will now synthesize baselines.
WebKit’s implementation of CSS Variables has been removed. Even though it has been disabled for ages and the implementation never shipped in stable builds, I’m quite a fan of variables. It just makes creating and, more importantly, maintaining large websites a lot easier. Nevertheless, since Google really wants the feature to be implemented, be sure to keep an eye out for this bug if you’re interested as well.
Implementation is one thing, but getting them standardized and available in other engines won’t be easy. With an essay like this around from a member of the CSS Working Group and a lot of discussion in general, reaching a consensus on any syntax, behavior or draft won’t be simple.
Other updates which occurred last week:
Google Chrome’s Terms of Service have been updated, adding additional terms for Enterprise use.
The style property on attribute nodes has been removed, except for Objective-C bindings.
Internally Web Inspector’s Storage Panel has been renamed to Resources Panel as well.
CSS files included for Chromium’s Web Inspector will be concatenated.
WebKit now really passes the Acid 3 test, as two bugs were cancelling each other out.
Synchronization of resizing the renderer for accelerated compositing no longer is Darwin-specific.
Downloads in Chromium may now be restarted if they previously have been cancelled.
Asynchronous file writers will now be available for Web Workers.
The fullscreen UA-stylesheet will now only be injected when the document is in fullscreen mode.
Multiple background images on an element won’t cause repeated repaints anymore.
More message-functions have been added in preparation of full support for interactive validation.
Navigating on websites with dark backgrounds used to result in white flashes – it won’t anymore.
The focus ring on image maps has been updated to take zooming into account.
The spatial navigation’s node selection algorithm has been updated quite significantly.
The network-error pages will now only contain gradients if the user’s display supports high color depths.
DirectX diagnostics will now be gathered asynchronously on about:gpuinfo due to performance reasons.
A search box has been added to the DOM UI, but it doesn’t actually do anything yet.
The Omnibox Extension API has been moved out of its experimental status.
The “Edit Bookmark” dialogs on Chromium for Windows are now resizable as well. Great change really.
And that’s all for this week. If you happen to be a member of Fronteers, the annual general meeting will be held on the 24th of November. Furthermore, I’ll be giving a presentation about the Audio APIs on the 13th of December in Groningen, the Netherlands. If you speak Dutch and would like to attend, feel free to sign up!
With 1,087 commits in the past week, most of which were created for the Chromium project, it has been another average week. This week’s update will be brief considering I’m a bit short on time right now :).
There have been some interesting changes to form-support within WebKit in the last week. A bunch of new attributes are now available, like the form-attribute, as well as the formaction, formenctype, formmethod and formtarget attributes. Meanwhile, work on the framework for interactive validation support continues.
More progress has been made on supporting vertical text within WebKit. Support for vertical ruby has been finalized and lists now work vertically as well. Furthermore, repaint invalidation has been fixed and a number of bugs with the orientation of fonts have been solved as well.
Within Chromium’s about:flags page, support for click-to-play, experimental extension APIs and Snap Start has been added. For the sake of clearing up the situation around issue 61745 a bit: different from what news sites report, preloading pages in the background has not been implemented yet, and therefore it’s impossibleto notice improved performance. Makes sense, right?
Other changes which occurred last week:
Option elements for Chromium can now be hidden by setting the CSS property display to none.
The accuracy of serialization of numeric input elements has been decreased, WebKit was too precise.
The first steps towards exposing the synchronous implementation of File Writer have been made.
Support for the HTML5 ruby elements cannot be disabled anymore.
canvas.putImageData (canvas.getImageData (..)) will now do its job without losing quality.
Support for multisampling has been added to the GPU’s drawing buffer.
The selectionStart and selectionEnd properties will now report the right values for textareas.
Parsing of various CSS keywords has been added for the content-property to fix out-of-flow counters.
Although, statistically seen, it has been quite a regular week with 1,096 commits, 494 for WebKit and 602 for Chromium, there have been some very nice changes and announcements over the past seven days.
As for ongoing work, Dave Hyatt added support for selections on vertical text, and made sure that repaint invalidation now works with vertical lines as well. Dan Bernstein committed basic support for multiple writing modes in tables, including support for collapsing borders.
Meanwhile, Chris Rogers has been busy landing parts of the Audio API in WebKit. The RealtimeAnalyser (and its Node) landed about a week ago, just like the ConvolverNode and the AudioBufferSourceNode. A class to pass on the active buffers to the onaudioprocess event, named the AudioProcessingEvents Interface, has been committed as well. With more patches in the queue, progress on the API steadily continues.
Several announcements were done during one of the keynotes at Adobe’s MAX conference last month, some of which illustrated Adobe’s interest in HTML5. Mark Anders introduced EDGE, giving web developers an interface similar to Adobe Flash for creating HTML-based animations on their websites. Furthermore, it was also announced that Adobe will be contributing an animation framework to jQuery, as well as proposing and contributing changes to WebKit.
Last week Paul Gubbay demoed one of the prototypes the team at Adobe has been working at, showing text-wrapping around arbitrary shapes. It actually consists of two parts: a JavaScript framework, which is likely to work with jQuery, allowing the user to move the text and image around, as well as handling text reflows. The WebKit-side of the demonstration exists of a CSS property in which a polygon gets defined. This polygon defines a region to which text should be clipped, or from which text should be excluded.
Adobe is working together with Google to accelerate the process of landing the changes in WebKit, and thus making them available in a browser release. While the CSS property’s syntax is expected to evolve following community feedback, Adobe certainly intends to propose the feature to the CSS Working Group.
In terms of standards compliance, getComputedStyle received an update allowing you to retrieve all backgrounds instead of just the first one. The window.name property will now return an empty string for unnamed windows and frames and, in preparation of landing the actual interactive validation UI, a framework for showing the messages has been added as well.
Kenichi Ishibashi added support for the HTML5 <output> element, which is intended to represent the result of a calculation of two or more other form fields. After a way too long period of time, Erik Arvidsson landed an adjusted version of my patch to support the unprefixed box-sizing CSS property. Finally, since the IETF now seems to consider prefixed HTTP headers harmful, the “X-Purpose” header has been renamed to “Purpose”.
More updates which occurred last week:
The integrated PDF viewer has landed in Chrome’s Beta channel.
A minor update was done to the EULA of Chrome OS, clarifying the concept and implications of themes.
All the poor folks with e-mail addresses ending with @google.com have hard-coded screen locking.
Many thanks to Paul Gubbay and Alexandru Costin from Adobe for answering my questions. Also, this page contains a clear lead about what’s (hopefully!) to expect for next week 😉
Another busy week has passed with 579 commits in the WebKit repository, and 683 in Chromium’s. Next to large amounts of on-going work on supporting the writing modes through CSS and great progress on the Web Audio implementation, a lot of other components have been improved or enhanced again.
Quite some work has been put into image support in both WebKit and Chromium. About three months after the idea first arose, the libjpeg-turbo library has landed in Chromium’s repository. As the name suggests, it’s basically a fast, optimized library to display JPEG images.
Furthermore, another image-related subject which is being worked on is enabling ICC Color Profiles for the open source image decoders in WebKit. Previously color profiles were supported on Mac OS X, through the CoreGraphics framework, but because Chromium on Mac has now switched to the open source decoders, it’s a temporary regression.
While most of the work on color profiles still seems to be focused on Mac OS X and, right now, on JPEG and PNG files, it’s a good sign that progress is being made. It might even open up the path for supporting color profiles on Windows and Linux. With larger resolutions, additional image formats and rendering on the GPU through accelerated compositing, it’ll be interesting to see where it’ll be going.
I’ve talked about two larger changes in Web Inspector in the past few weeks: the new Network Panel and the merge of the Resources and Storage panels. Earlier today, Pavel Feldman activated both changes, allowing them to land in recent Chromium builds. There still are bugs, and lots of fine-tuning, enhancements and moving things around, but it’s accessible and ready to be experimented with!
Chromium on the Mac OS X operating system will now actually use WebKit’s image decoders.
The File System API has now been integrated with Web Inspector, but isn’t visible yet.
New images for scrollbars on Chromium OS have been committed.
Dynamically inserted animated GIF images which don’t define a loop count will now only animate once.
The “seeked” event will be invoked when seeking for very small increments on media elements.
Resuming CSS Animations won’t invoke the “animationstart” event anymore.
The <input type=number> element will now be using single-precision IEEE 754 floats.
Quotas for IndexedDB databases are now calculated per origin, and no longer per database.
The “grammar” attribute for Google’s speech input has been added, named “x-webkit-grammar”.
The Google Chrome Extensions documentation site will soon be getting some additional love.
Notifications may now be 160 pixels tall, forty pixels more compared to the old limit.
The “Hyphen” library from the Hunspell project has been added to the project.
To all the people at TPAC: have a great week, I wish I could be there 🙂 If you want to stay informed about CSS proposals such as “drinking-mode“, read about the clothing guidelines and other interesting updates, keep an eye out for the #tpac hashtag on Twitter.
Update
I’ve revised the post following comments from Nico and Peter Kasting. WebKit (and Chromium) on Mac OS X already supported image color-profiles through the CoreGraphics libraries, and switching to the open source decoders created a temporary regression in the support. According to this comment, WebKit on Mac OS X already supported JPEG 2000, but that’s no longer the casenow that it doesn’t use the CoreGraphics library anymore.
While the release managers were busy with the release of Chrome 7, the rest of the developers checked in another 635 changes. Meanwhile, over at WebKit, 498 more changes contributed to another busy week.
As part of the ongoing effort on making the Web Inspector tools as convenient as possible, Pavel Feldman continued workon merging the Storage and the Resources panels. The new panel contains both the storage items as the resources used to build the current page, combined in a clear tree view. Meanwhile, the Network panel UI has been polished a bit, which hopefully brings it a bit closer to being released.
Google’s Ben Murdoch added support for two new methods on the Document object: document.createTouch and document.createTouchList. Until now, these two properties were only available for the iPhone browser, but since other WebKit-based mobile browsers are gaining strongly in popularity, as well as the fact that many websites use them to check for touch-support, it made sense to add them to the document object.
No, it did not open Anne van Kesteren’s website in some ancient proprietary browser, this actually happened in the latest Chromium build. A subject I have deliberately not mentioned in my posts is Dave Hyatt’s amazing work on supporting the text and block-flow defined in the CSS3 Writing Modes module. Last Thursday a patch landed adding the possibility to have vertical text on your pages.
While there’s still a lot of work to do before the implementation will be finished, you can play around with it by downloading a Chromium build and using the “-webkit-writing-mode” property with the “vertical-rl” value. The feature has been available in Internet Explorer since version seven as well.
In terms of improved standard support, WebKit’s document.write now ignores calls from delayed scripts (r5616 of the HTML5 spec). The “in select”-mode has been added to the HTML parser and the “in foreign content”-mode has been rewritten. The rich-editing RemoveFormat command has been rewritten as well.
The Web Inspector Storage Panel has been updated with errors, warnings and search.
The File API has been updated with the latest specification changes, mostly related to error codes.
I’m hoping to publish a blog post about the CSS writing modes in the next week, as there certainly are a lot of interesting things to talk about. And, of course, another last week update in about seven days!
With another 1080 commits decorating the repositories there’s enough to tell you about last week again.
There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the about:labs page last week. Firstly, it has been renamed to “about:flags“, and for good reason: almost all criteria for adding new entries to the page have been lifted, meaning that pretty much everything which has a command line flag may have a place on that page. While this obviously is a good thing for convenience, it also means something could be enabled which constantly crashes Chrome. For that reason, the “–no-experiments” flag has been added.
Within WebKit support for the “onreadystatechange” event on the Document has been added, anchor elements now have the getParameter method from Adam Barth’s URL API and canvasses are now aware of the currentColor color. Also, all IndexedDB related properties on the window object have been prefixed with “webkit”. Unfortunately, support for <script defer> has been reverted.
The Chromium Team chose to enable their implementation of the FileSystem API by default. The API, which still is rather unknown among developers, has been built on top of two other specifications: the File API and the File Writer API. When you combine them and throw in some directories, Chrome’s latest feature comes out.
One of the larger use-cases I can see with the API is its ability to act like an extensive, hierarchic and programmable Application Cache. Suppose you’re making an online application which works like Spotify, the interface, playlists and all could be stored offline using a manifest, but the music itself wouldn’t be available offline. Using the FileSystem API, you could create a directory for each playlist and store the audio-files in them. There is a downside too, as the advocated API is asynchronous, it has a steep learning curve.
Other changes this week include:
Chromium now supports 5.1 surround sounds, no more downmixing to stereo.
The screen.availLeft property can now contain negative values as well.
Some basic documentation about creating CRX (extension) files has been released.
Search providers may now have separate URLs for instant results.
Some fixes were done related to JavascriptCore’s Automatic Semicolon Insertion.
execCommand(‘formatBlock’) now supports twelve new elements.
The WebKit Cairo port now uses their new ContextShadow system for shadows.
So, that’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and if you’ve got any comments or suggestions, feel free to add a comment about them, e-mail me or poke me on Twitter!
Only three commits short of 700 in the past week, the Chromium Team has been quite active. The Chromium nightlies have been pushed up to version 8, just over seven weeks after version seven. WebKit received 485 commits, but there were some large changes among them like support for ECMAScript 5’s Strict Mode.
Well over two years after Eric Lake filed Issue 173, there is finally some visible progress on previewing a print in Chromium. When using the latest nightly, you should launch Chrome using the “–enable-print-preview” flag and browse to “chrome://print/” to see a (not working!) preview of the feature. Enabling the Cloud Printing Proxy for Windows may now be done through the Labs page and a lotof work on supporting the CSS Paged Media Modules has been completed already. The feature is currently scheduled for milestone 9, which may be as soon as six weeks from now.
Another large change is that support for IndexedDB has been enabled by default. IndexedDB is a specification originally proposed by Oracle, but currently is being edited by experts from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft as well. Especially the latter makes this interesting, because since Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile has been positive about IndexedDB as well, chances on getting an interoperable database system are looking good.
The Web Inspector team hasn’t been idle either, and although I haven’t said much about it in the past few weeks, there certainly are some exciting changes coming up. Some more fine-tuning was done on the Network panel, the Extension API now also exposes a document’s body. Setting breakpoints on specific events will become a possibility too! And did I mention remote debugging?
Many of these features are still disabled in the Chromium builds. If you’d like to play around with them, you will either have to build Chromium yourself or create yourself a WebKit build. In time these features will be enabled for all Chromium builds, something which surely will be announced on the Chromium Blog.
Also great news for the Safari users, as Oliver Hunt landed support for ECMAScript 5’s Strict Mode just a few hours ago. In a nutshell, strict mode will disable some really bad practices in your JavaScript code like eval() and the with-construct. These changes couldn’t be applied by default, considering ECMAScript 5 had to remain backwards-compatible with ECMAScript 3. Until today, Kangax’ compatibility page shows that BESEN was the only JavaScript engine to support it, although Mozilla is actively working on supporting it.
Finally I just want to note down that I really don’t think recordings like these are going to make me popular, even though Christian Heilmann obviously thinks otherwise. A big thank you to the organization of Fronteers 2010, all the speakers, and of course all the visitors. The conference has been really great, cheers for that!
With 632 commits to the WebKit repository, and 608 towards the Chromium one -totalling 1240 commits-, it was a busy week. Safari seems to be gearing up for a new minor release, and Google pushed Chrome 7 to users participating in the beta-channel. Google also published a page explaining the differences between extensions, Packaged Applications and Hosted Applications.
Nikolas Zimmermann has done some amazing work on WebKit’s SVG implementation: almost all SVG Text layout-code has been rewritten. Because of this change, text in SVG files already consumes much less memory and performs better than it used to do. By splitting the layout process for texts into three phases rather than a single one, future patches can add various forms of caching. This will improve the rendering performance even more.
Following the WebM project, which provides a free and open-source video codec, Google has announced WebP: an image format based on VP8’s intra-frame techniques. According to Google’s announcement, using WebP will reduce the size of your images by an average of 39%, compared to today’s image formats.
In reality, I’m not so sure. Jason Garrett-Glaser, an x264 developer, concluded that the quality is poor, and that Google’s timing for announcing the format is odd. Jacob Miller, obviously being less biased, concluded that the compression schema indeed outperforms JPEG, but that WebP isn’t ready for real-world usage yet.
I absolutely agree that the timing surrounding this announcement is weird. There are some important features not (yet) available in WebP which could prove to be decisive in the success of the image format. I’m mainly talking about the limited file size it supports (a maximum of 16383 by 16383 pixels), no support for storing lossless images and no transparency (nor translucency?). For a future-proof image format, Google could also have looked at supporting other color-spaces (possibly even non-RGB, like the CIE XYZone). It makes me think like the announcement was a bit rushed, especially due to a sentence starting with “we plan to add”…
In my opinion, one of the primary things lacking for web development was a convenient way to modify the classes which applied to an element. While jQuery offered some excellent methods to do so, a proper native way wasn’t available. For that reason HTML5 introduces the “classList” property, which provices such an interface to each element on your page. While support for the property was added to Firefox well over a year ago, Erik Arvidsson added support to WebKit last Monday!
The <input type=number> element now supports theme-drawing on Windows for the spin buttons.
Speech input has now been enabled by default for all platforms within Google Chrome.
Starting next Thursday, Fronteers 2010 will be taking place at Pathé Tuschinski in Amsterdam. With speakers like Håkon Wium Lie, Christian Heilmann and Jeremy Keith it’s bound to become a success :). Finally, thanks to Finnur Thorarinsson for informing me about the issue, the Chromium Command-Line Flag RSS Feed will now properly include added arguments. They previously were included as if they got removed.
In terms of standards compliance, getComputedStyle received 
