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.
With the addition of another 552 commits in the last week, Chromium has breached the milestone of sixty thousand commits! In comparison, revision 60.000 landed in WebKit exactly four months ago. WebKit gained the contents of 539 commits last week, done by about a hundred different authors.
Support for the ping attribute on anchors (<a ping>) has been added in WebKit four days ago, following Firefox who had an implementation about four years ago. There are various ways to do this already, overriding the click-event and send out a ping using XHR, for example. The feature is still disabled by default, although a command line flag might be added in the near feature.
One of the things Adam Barth is currently working on is an URL API. Citing it, the API can be used for constructing, parsing and resolving URLs through scripting, easening up tasks like getting and setting parameters. Today the first part landed in WebKit, which added the “origin” property.
Google Code has added support for browsing the WebKit, Chromium and V8 repositories!
Linux support for launch-on-startup has been added to Chromium.
Accelerated Compositing won’t be enabled anymore for built-in pages and extensions.
An about:gpuhang page has been added, locking the GPU Process for debugging purposes.
Safe browsing’s database has become a lot faster now that SafeBrowsingStoreFile is enabled.
The images for match preview tearing and the speech input elements have received some love.
Chromium’s implementation of FileWriter has landed in WebKit.
WebKit used to crash when a font-size with “ex” units was given for canvasses, this has been fixed.
I’ve got quite some plans for the post next week, as I realize this one is lacking some graphical love. Until then, don’t forget that there’s an RSS Feed available for updates to Chromium’s command line flags, which could certainly give you a nice indication of what the team’s been working on!
Thanks to Ms2ger for a correction: Mozilla did not disable the ping attribute by default due to privacy concerns, but rather because the specification changed shortly before the Firefox 3 release.
Well over 200 developers added value to the Chromium and WebKit projects last week, delivering a combined total of 1018 patches to the repositories. Different from a week ago, there weren’t any huge noticeable changes this week. Most work was part of larger projects or stability and performance improvements.
Still, there have been a few updates related to standard support. The document.lastModified property was updated according to HTML5 last Tuesday, the Canvas Context will now parse system colors and work on supporting the “block-flow” and “writing-mode” CSS properties seems to have been started.
More work has been completed last week on Google’s effort to move the options dialogs to webpages. You can enable the tabbed options page yourself by supplying the --enable-tabbed-options flag to Chrome or going to the about:labs page if you’re running Google Canary or Chromium. Furthermore, information and screenshots about the new History UI are available as well. Check out issue 52697 and the new designs.
Are you one of the poor folks working at a company which uses Internet Explorer as their primary browser, as well as (group) policies to severely limit your freedom? Good news! In the future you might be using Google Chrome with (group) policies which severely limit your freedom! The team seems to be gearing up in order to make their browser more interesting for larger organizations, as can be seen on the Documentation for Administrators page on the Chromium website, including quick-start guides for Windows, Apple and Linux.
And that’s it for this week! Keep in mind, if you’d like to see people like Brendan Eich, Steve Faulkner, Christian Heilmann, Paul Irish and Jeremy Keith speaking about the web, there’s only a few tickets left for Fronteers 2010. The conference will take place on the 7th and 8th of October in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Finally, a big Thank You to Steve Souders and Juriy Zaytsev for commenting on the <script> loading graph!
With just over a thousand commits in the last seven days, the majority of which were pushed towards the WebKit repository, activity seems to be slightly down in comparison with the previous weeks. Nevertheless, last week brought some interesting changes: changes to the script element, CSS timing functions and Hardware Acceleration for the masses.
On Wednesday Google made an announcement which was quite hard to miss: Google Instant. Google Search anticipates on what you’re going to search for and starts displaying results while you’re still typing. Chrome now features a similar possibility named match preview, although I think Chrome Instant sounds more appropriate. You can enable it by supplying the --enable-match-preview flag when launching Chromium, but keep in mind that the implementation still is rather rough.
Since the new HTML5 Parser and Tree Builder in WebKit kept timed script execution in mind, Tony Gentilcore was able to land support for <script async> only a few days after he added support for the defer attribute. To re-iterate, using the defer-attribute defers executing the script to after parsing the page has been completed. The async-attribute enables asynchronous execution of the script as soon as it’s available, therefore not blocking the parser.
Following the discussions of the face-to-face meeting of the CSS Working Group three weeks ago, Apple’s Dean Jackson modified the CSS3 Transitions and Animations modules to include a new timing function called “steps“. The name is fairly obvious: instead of having a continuous transition, the selected properties transition in a predefined number of steps. This timing function landed in WebKit last Thursday!
As you can see, all seven timing functions for transitions have been included in this example. The animated color-boxes in the JavaScript column show what a browser should be doing according to the specification, while the CSS column shows how your browser displays it. Furthermore, if you’re using a modern browser, you can see an animated graph displaying how a certain timing function works by clicking on its name!
Other updates which occurred in WebKit and Chromium last week include:
Using the middle mouse-button no longer fire the onclick event, matching IE and Firefox.
Finally, for the ones of you who like to be up-to-date as well, I’ve added RSS feeds for my Vendor Prefixed CSS Properties page (feed) and the overview pages of Google Chrome Command Line Switches (feed). Since most content on these pages gets updated automatically, I figured this would be a nice addition. While I cannot guarantee that they already work perfectly at this point, in theory they should be fine. See you next week!
Exactly 625 days after the release of the first stable version, the Google Chrome browser has hit an important milestone: over 10% of the internet users -about 197 million people- use Chrome as their browser. That equals about 315 thousand new users every day, which is rather mind blowing if you ask me. Being well aware of this, the Chromium and WebKit teams were responsible for another 1.137 commits in the last week!
The sixth major version of Google Chrome has been released as a stable version, bringing support for tons of new features and better performance and stability. Furthermore, for a brief moment it looked like Chromium would be getting an auto-updater. While this is something people have been asking for ever since the first Chromium builds were released, it looks like Google Canary will remain to be closest to that idea.
As for new HTML and CSS related features, Tony Gentilcore added support for delayed script execution using the defer attribute. Furthermore, percentages may now be used as values for the border-radius CSS property. The used radius will be equal to the given percentage of the width or height of it’s border-box.
Video elements no longer automatically loop after playback has completed.
Enabling accelerated compositing in Chromium won’t make your scrollbar blue anymore.
Synchronous File Reader operations may now be used in Web Workers.
Clicking on a WebKit Notification now fires a click event.
Audio Recording for speech input fields is now available for Linux as well, via ALSA.
The V8 JavaScript engine has reached version 2.4: various bugfixes and performance improvements.
A bit technical this week, I realize that 🙂 For this week it looks like accelerated compositing and 3D CSS will be enabled by default and work on full-screen video could come closer to being finished. With Firefox implementing 3D CSS as well, I’m curious about the demos which surely could be arriving soon now.
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.
Since the new HTML5 Parser and Tree Builder in WebKit kept timed script execution in mind, Tony Gentilcore was able 
