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.
Highlights among this week’s 1,291 commits are quite some Chrome OS touch-related changes, support for relatively positioned table-cells and a wider experiment for background pre-rendering in Chromium.
The Chrome OS team seems to be gearing up for a tablet release. Following someusability-related improvements for touch-based devices, the user-agent string will now indicate the usage of a touch-only device. Furthermore, a brand new New Tab Page landed which provides an iPad-like overview of the installed applications. For all those who want to get a sneak previous of the page, but don’t own a Chrome OS touch-device yet, enable the overview pagina using the “Experimental new tab page” setting on about:flags.
In light of improving specification-compliance, WebKit’s SVG implementation received a rather large commit which implements proper bi-directionality support for SVG Text. Rounding for non-integral percentages has been fixed and exporting WebGL-canvasses to an image, texture or Data URL will now honor the non-premultiplied-alpha attribute.
Relatively positioned table-cells have gained support from the engine and the maxlength attribute for textarea-elements will now take newlines into account. Finally, shadows are now supported for a canvas’ drawImage method and support for GPU-accelerated shadows has been added.
Other changes which occurred in the last week:
The prerendering experiment now applies to 30% of the Canary users.
Auto-filled form elements will now also force a specific text-color, ensuring visibility.
Another week passed, bringing a total of 1,350 change-sets to Chromium (796 commits) and WebKit (554 commits). Highlights include a new logo for Chromium, selecting multiple tabs, an Animation API, CSS’ new text-orientation property and an improved pale-violet-red color.
Scott Violet landed the first functional part of a new feature: multiple tab selection. Instead of being able to select just one tab, multiple tabs can be selected by using <shift>+click or <ctrl>+click. While the feature still needs work, including proper rendering of multiple tabs and a better dragging thumbnail, it’s already available for you to check out in nightlies: just launch Chromium with “--enable-multi-tab-selection“.
Another change for Chromium’s tab bar is that adjoined tabs sharing a common title prefix, such as “Chromium Blog”, will have their titles elided. This means that the shown title will be more relevant and that it will be easier to find the tab you’re looking for. Right now it’s only available for Chromium builds on Windows, but support for the other platforms is in the works.
Dean Jackson landed the first part of an API for managing animations which apply to a certain element. The API is available in both Chromium and WebKit nightlies and adds a new method to DOM HTML Elements: webkitGetAnimations. It returns an AnimationList which contains the active animations, as Animation objects. As is visible here, it provides access to most common settings for CSS-based animations. While the play() and pause() methods are being exposed, they’ll start functioning after an upcoming patch lands.
As for new features, an initial part of HTML5’s DataTransferItem and DataTransferItems interfaces landed, together with a partial implementation for Chromium. Dave Hyatt implemented the text-orientation property from the CSS3 Writing Modes module, although it hasn’t been implemented for Windows yet. Luiz Agostini landed the rendering part for the <details> and <summary> implementations.
In the effort to improve standard compliance, several commits addressed failures in the CSS 2.1 test-suite. Several issues with the ex unit have been solved, parsing for background position components has been rewritten and the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements may now be used on table rows. Furthermore, the values of the named “palevioletred” and “mediumpurple” colors have been fixed.
One not so significant, yet certainly interesting change, is the inclusion of the jQuery test-suite in the WebKit tree. Widely used as the library is, it’s a good thing to see that both parties will test on each other’s software to ensure full compatibility.
Other changes which occurred last week:
Chromium received a new logo, quite different from the previous one.
A minor change in preparation of Chromium’s registerProtocolHandler implementation.
Moving nodes across different documents in the DOM is now possible for certain methods.
JavaScriptCore fixed three issues with the RegExp prototype, improving conformance with ES5.
Through a minor Accept-header change, WebKit now properly indicates to prefer HTML over XML.
Safari on Mac OS X Lion will be able to use the AV Foundation framework for media playback.
Soft hyphens will now always be correctly rendered when a linebreak occurs.
With 617 commits at the WebKit side and 808 for Chromium, last week was another busy week. Highlights are that WebKit finally implements CSS 2.1 quotes and lots of work on several upcoming features, such as MHTML.
One feature a lot of people are looking out for is the inclusion of a date-picker in WebKit. Tamura Kent started implementing a calendar for several date-related input types exactly a month ago, which has now evolved in a graphical and usable date picker.
While the implementation is by no means complete, it’s a good thing that work is being done to finish support for Web Forms. Keep an eye out on bug 53961 to stay up-to-date.
Chromium users may have seen a new option appear on their about:flags page: “P2P API”. While not a lot is known about the team’s plans, it’s safe to assume that implementation of the HTML5 peer-to-peer connection API has been started, together with an interface for Pepper. So far, an implementation for Mac and Linux was added, a dispatcher for the renderer and initial work on the internal implementation.
The Web Inspector team improved performance of DOM search as it was extremely slow for GMail. The summary bar in the network panel’s item view won’t overlap the contents anymore. Furthermore, the fourth part of Detailed Heap Snapshots landed in WebKit as well, which implements displaying of different snapshot projections. While they’re not available yet, there are some screenshots available.
As for standard-related updates, Dave Hyatt made sure that positioned elements work with vertical text. Ruby text will now be expanded when it’s shorter than its base and the document.open implementation has been updated per the HTML5 specification.
Carol Szabo implemented full support for quotes in WebKit, following the CSS 2.1 specification. The -webkit-hyphenate-limit-{before,after} CSS properties have been added. Safari’s JavaScriptCore JavaScript Engine now implements the seal/freeze/preventExtensions methods for normal object types, except for arrays.
Other changes which occured last week include:
The -webkit-hyphenate-locale CSS property has been renamed to -webkit-locale.
Layout performance for pages with a lot of floating objects has been improved majorly.
Numeric input fields which have an initial value may be cleared again, and accept localized values.
Through an ICU update, Chrome now respects the new sorting rules for the French language.
WebKit’s GTK port now supports multiple threads for JavaScriptCore due to this change.
Handling of the currentColor color for SVG now follows the specification.
Support for handling quoted-printable strings has been added, in preparation of MHTML support.
CSS Outlines will now be drawn for table and table-cell elements.
The WebKit2 API now supports printing pages on Windows.
A redundant “Windows; ” has been dropped from the default User Agent string on Windows.
The fast-path for rgba() parsing now properly clamps out-of-range alpha values.
Another site for the hardcoded HSTS list; shouldn’t we try to avoid doing this?
Support for the WebKit Full-Screen API has been added to Chromium, hidden behind a flag.
The speech bubble volume indicator has been improved with an indicator for background noise.
Another flag has been added to trigger the multi-profile feature, no functionality yet either.
And that’s it again. If you want to dig around in the updates from two weeks ago, check out all WebKit and Chromium commits. Upcoming work to keep an eye out for are the visibility API and an implementation of the text-orientation CSS property. Finally: Thanks, guys! 🙂
With 611 commits at Chromium and 733 commits at WebKit, last week brought a total of 1,344 changesets. Highlights include dynamic minimum intervals for DOM Timers and the addition of a chrome://crashes page.
Web Inspector will now reflect style changes when they occur without the Inspector, e.g. though a piece of JavaScript code. Furthermore, work has been laid out for improving the Web Inspector debugging protocol. A document on Google Docs has been created, carefully drafting the JSON-based protocol.
One downside of having a tabbed browser is that websites often remain open while you aren’t using them. Normally this isn’t a problem, but sites with high frequency timers can continue to use a lot of CPU this way. Therefore Chromium intends to make the minimum DOM Timer interval dependent on the visibility of the tab.
Following this WebKit patch, Kenneth Russell landed both support for dynamic values and an experimental decrease from 4 milliseconds for foreground tabs to 1 second for background tabs. While it was reverted shortly after it landed (and thus not available anymore), it certainly is an experiment to keep an eye out for.
Other interesting Chromium changes include the feature for Mac OS X users to hide extension badges via their context menu, addition of a chrome://crashes page to display recently reported crashes and renewed information about the latest version of Adobe Reader, Flash, Shockwave and RealPlayer. The minimum version of Java has been increased to make sure that the user’s installation includes a critical patch.
As for specification-related updates, Luiz Agostini continued his work on implementing the HTML5 <details> and <summary> elements by supporting localized text for them. Right now a patch implementing the element’s rendering is up for review. Support for “dir=auto” has been added, the prepare a scriptsection of the <script> element has been implemented and Chromium was taught how to handle elliptical gradients.
A special note for Dave Hyatt’s monster patch which changed WebKit’s entire line box tree from using integers to using floats. This allowed for the removal of many rounding hacks and opens up the path for features such as sub-pixel positioning for fonts.
Other changes which occurred last week:
Select elements may now be borderless on Chromium for Linux.
The IndexedDB team has finished up implementing the new event model.
Chromium’s WebDriver protocol gained support for manipulating cookies for a session.
Initial support for per-origin quotas has been added to the IndexedDB implementation.
The fast CSS selector path has been enabled for child and subselector combinators.
The third part or the detailed heap snapshot implementation for V8 has landed.
No more green pixels as the edges of certain GPU-accelerated videos due to this commit.
Opening Adobe Reader for PDFs can be enabled by default via an information bar again.
An initial version of the WebGL OES_vertex_array_object extension has been implemented.
The parser will now yield for layout before running scripts, which improves the first paint-time
significantly for slower connection speeds (up to 20% on YouTube!).
The set and remove cookie methods from Chromium’s Cookie Extension API now support callbacks.
Displaying fixed elements on scaled pages has been improved.
Developers working on WebKit changes through Chromium can now access its debugging channels.
SVG Animations are now able to animate to or from “inherit” and “currentColor” values.
Chromoting has received various minor updates, but still is not accessible for end-users.
New icons have been committed for Chromium to indicate whether prerendering succeeded.
Badges have been added to Chromium OS to display what kind of mobile network is being used.
Unfortunately, I won’t be around next week to write an update, so the next update will be two weeks from now. Check out Planet Chromium for updates in the meantime. See you on the 7th (or earlier elsewhere)!
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.
