Thanksgiving made last week a short week for people living in the United States, and as such only 1,079 changes landed to the Chromium and WebKit repositories. Highlights include a number of extension API updates, work on supporting game controllers and WebGL for the WebKitGTK port.
Quite some housekeeping has been done in Chromium’s extension APIs: the clipboard API has been removed in favor of document.execCommand, the Settings API has been renamed to the Storage API and notifications were added for screen wake-ups and unlocks. Also new is the ability to change a window’s state.
In light of the recent commit milestones Chromium and WebKit hit, it’s noteworthy to add that v8 reached revision 10,000 last week. Performance of switches using string clauses has been improved and preliminary detection for ES.next’s extended mode has been added, which basically reflects strict mode with some added functionality.
Another two CSS 2.1 conformance errors were fixed, the CSS Exclusions implementation has been aligned with the specification and the wrap property will now be parsed. A crash with filters was fixed, and the first step towards being able to use CSS Transforms on SVG elements also landed last week.
WebKit’s side of supporting game controllers was landed by Scott Graham, together with the first part of the Chromium-side implementation. It may be tested using the –enable-gamepad command line flag, or via about:flags. The addCue and removeCue methods for subtitles are now supported, and the HTML5 dirname and Microdata properties attributes are now supported.
Other changes which occurred last week:
- Installing Google Chrome Frame on Windows Vista RTM’s stock Internet Explorer 7 is now possible.
- Another good step for the GStreamer-based Web Audio API implementation: audio destinations.
- A low-entropy, shared secret authentication protocol called P224 was added to Chromium.
- Page zoom factors have been normalized to produce more user-friendly zoom percentages and limitations.
- The ability to create desktop shortcuts for Chrome Profiles has been implemented for Windows.
- The first part of the <meta name=referrer> implementation has landed in Chromium.
- WebGL has been enabled by default for the WebKitGTK port!
- Chromium’s embedding code for GetUserMedia has been implemented in WebKit, another step closer.
- The WebKit-side of supporting asynchronous spell-checking landed last week.
- Usability of Web Inspector’s auto-complete suggestion box has been improved.
- Some test-cases have been added for the Pointer Lock API at WebKit.
And that’s it again. Interesting changes for the upcoming week include the NamedFlow JavaScript interface for CSS Regions and stack traces for cross-origin access errors within Web Inspector.