Renewed form validation UI, fuller full-screen and advanced fonts

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 15

With just 1,227 commits in the past week, 487 at WebKit’s and 740 at Chromium’s, it has been a normal week again. This week’s highlights include a new validation message UI, two full-screen modes for Chromium on Mac OS X Lion and the first step in supporting low level font features through CSS.


With Nico Weber toggling the switch, Google Chrome versions 15 and beyond will no longer use GCC for compiling the source, but instead will be using Clang. Clang is the C, C++ and Objective C front-end for the LLVM compiler. This change has led to a size-drop of well over 10 megabytes in the size of Chromium.app!

In the effort of improving Chrome’s support for Mac OS X Lion, status bubbles will have their corners rounded appropriately now. More importantly, the concept of full-screen has been split into two modes: Lion’s own interpretation of “full-screen”, placing the window in it’s own space while still having a visible dock, and a presentation mode which is a more conventional full-screen mode.


Web Inspector won’t present warnings anymore when including a JSONP resource, and will pretty-print them in the Network Panel as well. The Script Panel now groups scripts by the folder they’re in, the scrolling position of the script console will be remembered when changing panels and arrows are now nicer to click on.

After adding a new performance test for float element lookup, Adobe’s Alexandru Chiculita landed an optimization which yields a performance improvement of about 150% for looking up a floated element. Nice!

As for specification related work, using a percentage value for an object’s border attribute now works appropriately. The PeerConnection interface from the Peer2Peer API has been implemented, a VTT parser has been added for subtitles for the <track> element and an important part in supporting <input type=color> has landed too.

The first step in supporting CSS3 font features has been implemented by Kenichi Ishibashi, namely parsing of the font-feature-settings CSS property. The property, which is already available in Mozilla Firefox, allows web authors to control low level font features such as discretionary ligatures and swashes.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And that’ll be all again 🙂

7 Responses to “Renewed form validation UI, fuller full-screen and advanced fonts”

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Hrm, whatever happened to the hide URL bar feature? Is it behind a flag?


Peter Beverloo

August 9, 2011 at 11:26 am

The experiment has ended for now, and the feature has been made inaccessible (unless you compile Chromium yourself). More information can be found in this issue. The UI team does not think it’s the direction in which Chrome’s UI should head.


Awww I really liked it. Would have been a great default if extension badges could have been worked into the mix somehow.

Well anyways, with all this talk of full-screen, I wonder if there’s anything planned like Gecko’s fullscreen API for web apps? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:FullScreenAPI All the full-screen talk in this update seems to be centered around OS X, so maybe I’m confused.


Peter Beverloo

August 11, 2011 at 1:47 am

Yes, the per-element full-screen API is available in WebKit, and I think Safari 5.1 should ship with it. Implementation in Chrome is under way, but not completely working yet. More information in this post!


kurtextrem

August 21, 2011 at 9:52 pm

Howto enable inspector on the inspector again? I need it now =/


Vsevolod Vlasov

October 7, 2011 at 12:08 am

To open an inspector on inspector you could press Ctrl-Shift-I in undocked window.