Planet WebKit

Last week in WebKit: Tab sizing and strings for IndexedDB

2012-05-14T14:54:07+00:00

A total of 650 commits landed in WebKit’s repositories last week, ending with revision 116915.

Web Inspector’s search box supports CSS selectors again, JavaScriptCore timers will now show up on the timeline and a context menu has been added for tabs.

Text decorations, such as underlines, will now be rendered for text in :first-line selectors. Implementation of the :first-letter selector was aligned with the specification. Eric landed stylesheet inheritance support for seamless iframes, as well as the ability to inherit styles from their parent iframe. The RadioNodeList interface is now supported, background-size is now part of the “background” shorthand and, albeit disabled, the <intent> element has landed.

IndexedDB now uses strings instead of numeric constants. Violation reports generated by Content Security Policy now also include the referer, original policy and the URL which got blocked. The File System API is now able to deal with cross-file system operations, widths and heights are now exposed for <input type=image> images, and the offsetLeft property was broken when used together with CSS Columns.

WebKit has also gained support for the tab-size CSS property. This property, which is also supported by Firefox and Opera, allows you to define the number of spaces a tab should be equal to.

Included among other minor updates on the WebKit website, the conditions under which the WebKit trademark can be used are now available on the Mac OS Forge website.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Half a megabyte of memory was saved by Andreas when viewing the full HTML5 specification.
The IETC CSS Values and Units tests have been added to WebKit’s test suite.
A first step towards implementing the HTML Media Capture API has been made.
Pages served with an XHTML-MP doctype will now automatically use a suitable viewport.

Tab Sizing, String Values for IndexedDB and Chrome 21

2012-05-14T14:49:35+00:00

1,693 changes landed last week, 650 in WebKit’s repositories and 1,043 in Chromium’s. Highlights include Chromium 21, support for the tab-size property and strings instead of constants for IndexedDB.

Web Inspector’s search box supports CSS selectors again, JavaScriptCore timers will now show up on the timeline and a context menu has been added for tabs.

WebKit has also gained support for the tab-size CSS property. This property, which is also supported by Firefox and Opera, allows you to define the number of spaces a tab should be equal to.

Included among other minor updates on the WebKit website, the conditions under which the WebKit trademark can be used are now available on the Mac OS Forge website.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Half a megabyte of memory was saved by Andreas when viewing the full HTML5 specification.
The declarative Web Request API is no longer experimental, and is now more thoroughly documented.
Work has started on implementing a Media Gallery Extension API.
The IETC CSS Values and Units tests have been added to WebKit’s test suite.
A first step towards implementing the HTML Media Capture API has been made.
Support for random wallpapers has been added to Chrome OS.
Pages served with an XHTML-MP doctype will now automatically use a suitable viewport.
Android’s Device Orientation implementation has been upstreamed.
The default extensions for Chromium have been updated, and now include Google Docs.
Chromium’s version number has been increased to be a Motzkin number: 21.
Japanese children are now able to play Pokemon again.

An exciting thing to keep an eye out for in the upcoming weeks is Luke’s work on bringing CSS Variables to WebKit, the announcement for which has already been made!

Japan Freedom Hackers: Assemble!

2012-05-10T16:50:58+00:00

Turns out I’ll get to spend the next two weeks in Tokyo, starting next Sunday. It will be third time I visit this weird and fascinating place, but I’m still excited to be there again.

Some time ago, in another trip, I proposed anyone who might be reading me to meet up and talk about all things GNOME or WebKit. Turns out I met some interesting people that way (hi everyone from Caixa Mágica!), so let’s try again: if you are reading this, are in Tokyo, and would like me to talk to your friends/colleagues/whatever about GNOME or WebKit I’d be happy to do so. We can also improvise a hackfest or anything else we can come up with. In exchange I only ask of you to show me around (always better with a local) and an unwavering commitment to freedom and justice.

Drop me a line at xan AT gnome DOT org, or leave a comment in this space.

Sub-pixel layout, Inspecting Web Socket Frames and Seamless Iframes

2012-05-09T11:43:05+00:00

Today’s update covers many Chromium and WebKit changes made over the past two weeks, meaning 2,055 commits for Chromium and 1,418 for WebKit, totaling up at 3,473 changes.

Web Inspector now offers the ability to disable all JavaScript execution on a page, and also allows Web Socket frames to be inspected. The shortcut overlay has received some UI polish and the Timeline Frame Mode has been taken out of experimental.

Fixed placeholders have been implemented for date input types, a form field’s entries supplied through a <datalist> are now barred from validation. The Apple Mac port removed support for BlobBuilder and the Selector APIs have been aligned with the specification when pseudo-element selectors are used.

Retrieving a canvas’ image data will now return a Uint8ClampedArray instead of a CanvasPixelArray object. In preparation of supporting getUserMedia on Chromium, the Peer Connection API implementation has been separated with a compile time flag. Tables now support the createTBody() method and the IndexedDB implementation can now open cursors based on a IDBKey, and advance cursors as well.

Eric landed the first parts of support for seamless iframes in WebKit, namely some tests, sandbox and styling and navigation. A vendor-prefixed version of the Performance Timeline API landed, the getUserMedia() method now takes an object instead of a string and the noteOn and noteOff methods of the Web Audio API’s oscillator got implemented.

Antti made it possible to share stylesheet data structures between documents, decreasing memory usage by several megabytes (take note, kling) depending on the port’s implementation. Furthermore, parsed stylesheets may now be cached, increasing performance of subsequent page loads.

Per commit 116009, Levi and Emil were able to close the meta bug for supporting sub-pixel layout in WebKit. While this has not yet been enabled for any port, this is a significant milestone for the project. This article provides some insight in the importance.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Code supporting positioned floats has been removed from WebKit, pending proper implementation.
The EFL port has enabled support for the <track> element, the Web Timing API and the Web Audio API!
The BlackBerry port enabled support for the download attribute on anchors.
Abhishek Arya (inferno) is now a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!
Chromium is working towards enabling getUserMedia by default.
Multiple input channels are now supported for the JavaScriptAudioNode.
HTTP Pipelining is now enabled for all users on Chrome’s dev channel.
All Chrome Canary Windows users will now receive the PPAPI-based Flash.
Work is being done to enable an x86 Chromium Android build, which would work in the emulator.
A new USB Extension API has been added to Chromium.
A command line flag for enabling Peer-to-Peer connections has been added, though is still experimental.
It’s now possible to save webpages as MHTML within Chromium.

And that’s it again, thanks for reading!

Last weeks in WebKit: sub-pixel layout and seamless iframes

2012-05-08T14:07:59+00:00

Since there wasn’t an update last week, this one briefly covers changes between revisions 114867 and 116271.

Antti made it possible to share stylesheet data structures between documents, decreasing memory usage by several megabytes (take note, kling) depending on the port’s implementation. Furthermore, parsed stylesheets may now be cached, increasing performance of subsequent page loads.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Code supporting positioned floats has been removed from WebKit, pending proper implementation.
The EFL port has enabled support for the <track> element, the Web Timing API and the Web Audio API!
The BlackBerry port enabled support for the download attribute on anchors.
Abhishek Arya (inferno) is now a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!
Alexis Menard is now a WebKit Reviewer as well, congratulations!
Chromium is working towards enabling getUserMedia by default.
Multiple input channels are now supported for the JavaScriptAudioNode.

Alexis Menard is a WebKit Reviewer!

2012-04-30T15:02:48+00:00

Alexis (aka darktears on IRC) has been an unstoppable WebKit coder in the last couple of years working at INdT/Nokia Brazil.

Among his contributions would be the Qt multimedia backends with GStreamer/QTKit, improvements to getComputedStyle, and countless other contributions in various parts of WebKit.

We’re happy to finally remove the word “unofficial” from his reviews. Welcome Alexis!

WebKit Contributors meeting, data-lists and HTTP pipelining

2012-04-26T17:18:52+00:00

Last week, a total of 1,575 landed in the repositories: 923 for Chromium and 652 to WebKit. Highlights include the WebKit Contributors meeting, Web Inspector updates and support for <datalist> in Chromium.

Last Thursday and Friday, Apple kindly hosted the 2012 WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino. With contributors from many different vendors around, a large number of subjects were covered in presentations and discussions. Transcripts of most of these are available on WebKit’s Trac, including a group photo of all attendees.

An experimental Style Panel has been introduced to Web Inspector which mimics the interface of the Script Panel, which also features an open stylesheet-dialog. Cross-frame security error spam when typing in the console is gone, calling document.open() will now reset the Elements Panel and the Inspector is now shimming the startsWith() and endsWith() methods on the String prototype, anticipating implementation of Microsoft’s proposal.

Parsing rules of the :nth-*() pseudo-classes has been aligned with the specification. Clipping issues with the CSS drop-shadow filter have been resolved and the “-webkit-filter” CSS property will now show up when enumerating over an element’s computed style.

Support for the HTML5 <datalist> element has been enabled for Chromium. It provides similar functionality to suggestions by the browser based on what you previously entered in a text field, with the difference that these suggestions are provided by the website.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The WebKitGTK port has enabled the Web Timing implementation.
Performance of several String-returning DOM attribute and property getters has been improved for v8.
The localStorage.setItem() method cannot override methods on the Storage prototype anymore.
The footprint of an element’s attributes has been reduced to a minimum for common usage.
The IndexedDB implementation can now retrieve values or keys by IDBKeyRanges.
HTTP pipelining has been enabled for 10% of Chrome’s dev-channel users.
The Chrome OS window manager (Aura) now supports the three-finger swipe.
Chromium’s touch optimized UI will make menu items 40 pixels in height.
Linux users using display resolution larger than 4000×4000 are now able to view all of Chrome again!

Next week’s update will probably be a bit brief as I’ll be in Barcelona. Thanks for reading!

Fuzzing for Security

2012-04-26T17:00:00+00:00

Web browsers are big, complicated pieces of software that are extremely difficult to secure. In the case of Chrome, it’s an even more interesting challenge as we contend with a codebase that evolves at a blisteringly fast pace. All of this means that we need to move very quickly to keep up, and one of the ways we do so is with a scaled out fuzzing infrastructure.

Chrome’s fuzzing infrastructure (affectionately named "ClusterFuzz") is built on top of a cluster of several hundred virtual machines running approximately six-thousand simultaneous Chrome instances. ClusterFuzz automatically grabs the most current Chrome LKGR (Last Known Good Revision), and hammers away at it to the tune of around fifty-million test cases a day. That capacity has roughly quadrupled since the system’s inception, and we plan to quadruple it again over the next few weeks.

With that kind of volume, we’d be overloaded if we just automated the test case generation and crash detection. That’s why we’ve automated the entire fuzzing pipeline, including the following processes:

Managing test cases and infrastructure - To run at maximum capacity we need to generate a constant stream of test cases, distribute them across thousands of Chrome instances running on hundreds of virtual machines, and track the results.
Analyzing crashes - The only crashes we care about for security purposes are the exploitable ones. So we use Address Sanitizer to instrument our Chrome binaries and provide detailed reports on potentially exploitable crashes.
Minimizing test cases - Fuzzer test cases are often very large files—usually as much as several hundred kilobytes each. So we take the generated test cases and distill them down to the few, essential pieces that actually trigger the crash.
Identifying regressions - The first step in getting a crash fixed is figuring out where it is and who should fix it. So this phase tracks the crash down to the range of changes that introduced it.
Verifying fixes - In order to verify when a crash is actually fixed, which we run the open crash cases against each new LKGR build.

In addition to manageability, this level of scale and automation provides a very important additional benefit. By aggressively tracking the Chrome LKGR builds, ClusterFuzz is evolving into a real-time security regression detection capability. To appreciate just what that means, consider that ClusterFuzz has detected 95 unique vulnerabilities since we brought it fully online at the end of last year. In that time, 44 of those vulnerabilities were identified and fixed before they ever had a chance to make it out to a stable release. As we further refine our process and increase our scale, we expect potential security regressions in stable releases to become increasingly less common.

Just like Chrome itself, our fuzzing work is constantly evolving and pushing the state of the art in both scale and techniques. In keeping with Chrome’s security principles, we’re helping to make the web safer by upstreaming the security fixes into projects we rely upon, like WebKit and FFmpeg. As we expand and improve ClusterFuzz, users of those upstream projects will continue to benefit.

Posted by Abhishek Arya and Cris Neckar, Chrome Security Team

Last week in WebKit: The Contributors Meeting and datalists

2012-04-26T00:01:25+00:00

A total of 652 changes landed last week in various branches of WebKit’s repository. This update covers changes up to revision 114894.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The WebKitGTK port has enabled the Web Timing implementation.
Performance of several String-returning DOM attribute and property getters has been improved for v8.
The localStorage.setItem() method cannot override methods on the Storage prototype anymore.
The footprint of an element’s attributes has been reduced to a minimum for common usage.
The IndexedDB implementation can now retrieve values or keys by IDBKeyRanges.

Abhishek Arya is now a WebKit reviewer!

2012-04-25T23:03:04+00:00

Abhishek, better known to the community as inferno, joined the WebKit community in March 2010, and he has been fixing security bugs in CSS, DOM, editing, rendering, and various other components in WebKit. Abhishek has contributed more than 260 patches, many of which are fixes to severe security bugs.

Please join me in welcoming Abhishek Arya as a new WebKit reviewer.

Limiting -khtml- and -apple- prefixes, and location.ancestorOrigins

2012-04-17T00:16:21+00:00

882 revisions landed in Chromium’s repository last week and 667 in WebKit’s. Highlights include removal of support for the -khtml- and -apple- CSS vendor prefixes in Chromium, and the new location.ancestorOrigins() method.

Work on Device Emulation in Web Inspector is continuing and now also supports dimension wrapping to mimic orientation changes, and a “fit to width” option which will inherit the browser window’s dimensions as the device’s resolution. Lines having a breakpoint will now show line numbers and the vertical timeline overview now shows the wall time.

Support for -khtml- and -apple- properties has been removed for most WebKit ports, including Chromium, after previous attempts failed due to compatibility issues. Background sizes 1. "> 1. "> 1. " href="http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/114095">are now correct if the page is zoomed out, the default box-shadow color now defaults to the element’s “color” property, the viewport-relative CSS units now work for Replaced objects (such as images) and the -webkit-image-set CSS property was enabled for the Chromium port.

The ancestorOrigins() method was added to the window.location object, Chromium now exposes the Battery Status API and a Mutation Observer’s attributeFilter is now able to deal with namespaced attributes as well. The contentNodes property for NamedFlows was added, JavaScriptAudioNodes now respect the number of output channels and timestamps used in WebVTT had their limits relaxed.

Split over a number of commits, Avi has renamed Chromium’s TabContents class to WebContentsImpl.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The backingStorePixelRatio property has been added to 2D Canvas contexts.
Microsoft’s Grid Layout tests have now been integrated in WebKit as well.
WebKit’s Microdata’s property collection implementation now features caching.
Implementation of the Encrypted Media Extensions API started in WebKit.
The new UI for date input types has been enabled for Chromium.
Jocelyn Turcotte now is a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!
Ten percent of Chrome uses will be subject to the SPDY/3 experiment.
Extension APIs can now be limited to certain release channels of Chromium.
Full-text regular expression search is now available on chrome://sync.
Pepper-based Flash is now enabled by default for Windows 8 Metro builds.

And that’ll be all . Maybe see you at the WebKit’s Contributors Meeting!

Last week in WebKit: CSS’ -khtml- and -apple-, and ancestorOrigins

2012-04-16T23:00:03+00:00

667 commits made it into WebKit’s repository last week.

Support for -khtml- and -apple- properties has been removed for some WebKit ports, including Chromium, after previous attempts failed due to compatibility issues. Background sizes 1. "> 1. "> 1. " href="http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/114095">are now correct if the page is zoomed out, the default box-shadow color now defaults to the element’s “color” property, the viewport-relative CSS units now work for Replaced objects (such as images) and the -webkit-image-set CSS property was enabled for the Chromium port.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The backingStorePixelRatio property has been added to 2D Canvas contexts.
Microsoft’s Grid Layout tests have now been integrated in WebKit as well.
WebKit’s Microdata’s property collection implementation now features caching.
Implementation of the Encrypted Media Extensions API started in WebKit.
The new UI for date input types has been enabled for Chromium.
Jocelyn Turcotte now is a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!

Jocelyn Turcotte is a WebKit reviewer!

2012-04-13T06:12:10+00:00

Jocelyn has been a key contributor to the Qt port for many years now and has
lately been exploring the accelerated land of the texture mapper on the
WebKit2 planet.

Please join me in congratulating Jocelyn on his new role as a WebKit reviewer!

UI for date-input fields, Iframe’s srcdoc attribute and Flexbox updates

2012-04-10T21:35:33+00:00

Last week brought 995 commits to the Chromium repository and 732 to WebKit’s. Highlights include work on the user interface for date-input fields and the “srcdoc” attribute for iframes.

The animatedPathSegList property for SVG path elements has been implemented, completing support for the animVal properties. Minor type updates were done aligning WebKit’s typed array implementation with the specification, the Web Audio API’s Oscillator and WaveTable interfaces have been implemented and plumbing for the new JavaScript Speech API continues.

Support for the CSS flex() function has been removed in favor of the flex property, which Tony Chang implemented and made animatable. Empty @media and @charset declarations are now being ignored, image-set updates dynamically when the device scale factor changes and syntax was updated for two CSS Exclusion functions.

Now that a user interface for color input types is available, next in line is an interface for the date and time input types. Kent Tamura has been working on implementing this, an early example of which can be seen here. Meanwhile, work has started on cleaning up and implementing support for <datalist>. The <iframe srcdoc> attribute is now also supported, allowing untrusted HTML code to leverage an iframe’s sandbox constraints.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Both the backend and frontend for device metrics emulation in Web Inspector have been implemented.
The BlackBerry port has added client implementations for the Battery Status and Vibration APIs.
WebKit’s Web Intents implementation has been prefixed with the a vendor prefix.
The “let” keyword has been unreserved in JavaScriptCore as reserving it caused compatibility problems.
Microsoft’s backgrounds and border tests from the IE Test-center are now included in WebKit.
The scroll position won’t be lost anymore after hiding and re-showing an element.
Chromium’s Chrome to Mobile feature is now enabled by default.
Asynchronous spell-checking can now be enabled through about:flags.

As always, thanks for reading. Next week’s update may be a bit brief as I’ll be in the Mountain View area, also attending the WebKit Contributors Meeting!

Last week in WebKit: Flexbox updates and iframe’s srcdoc attribute

2012-04-10T14:25:26+00:00

A total of 732 commits landed in WebKit’s repository last week.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Both the backend and frontend for device metrics emulation in Web Inspector have been implemented.
The BlackBerry port has added client implementations for the Battery Status and Vibration APIs.
WebKit’s Web Intents implementation has been prefixed with the a vendor prefix.
The “let” keyword has been unreserved in JavaScriptCore as reserving it caused compatibility problems.
Microsoft’s backgrounds and border tests from the IE Test-center are now included in WebKit.
The scroll position won’t be lost anymore after hiding and re-showing an element.

Announcing Remote Debugging Protocol v1.0

2012-04-09T09:15:49+00:00

It has been almost a year since we announced the support for WebKit remote debugging. It is now officially supported by BlackBerry PlayBook and in Chrome for Android. Latest version of Chrome introduces new extensions API that exposes it to the in-browser clients as well.

Today we are happy to announce the v1.0 of the remote debugging protocol. We commit to supporting it and maintain its backward compatibility from now on. Since we receive a lot of questions on the remote debugging from the port owners, protocol clients and WebKit contributors, I’d like to provide a brief remote debugging 101 here. It will provide answers to the questions such as:

What is the structure of the remote debugging message?
Is there a documentation of the protocol messages?
Is remote debugging protocol versioned? How is backward compatibility defined?
What do I need to do in order to support remote debugging with standard Web Inspector front-end in my WebKit port?

Protocol definition

Protocol schema

WebKit is using JSON-RPC 2.0 protocol for the remote debugging. Clients send commands to the backend and receive responses in return. Backend can generate notifications upon particular events on its own. Commands, responses and notifications are all JSON-serialized objects.

The remote debugging protocol schema is defined by the Inspector.json. Protocol documentation, along with parts of the inspector source code, is generated from that file. We group commands and events of a particular nature into domains such as DOM, Debugger, Network for the user’s convenience.

Commands and notifications

Here is a sample command that is setting a breakpoint:

{
    "id": 10, // <-- command sequence number generated by the caller
    "method": "Debugger.setBreakpointByUrl", // <-- protocol method
    "params": { // <-- named parameters map
        "lineNumber": 23,
        "url": "http://www.webkit.org/index.html"
    }
}

Backend responds to all the commands either with a result or with an error message. For the above command, the backend will generate the following response:

{
    "id": 10, // <-- same id as in the command
    "result": { // <-- command result
        "breakpointId": "http://www.webkit.org/index.html:23",
        "locations": [
            {
                "lineNumber": 23,
                "columnNumber": 10
            }
        ]
    }
}

Notifications don’t have identifiers. For example, when JavaScript source is evaluated in the virtual machine, following notification is sent to the client:

{
    "method": "Debugger.scriptParsed", // <-- notification method
    "params": { // <--notification parameters
        "scriptId": "15",
        "url": "http://www.webkit.org/index.html",
        "startLine": 22,
        "startColumn": 12,
        "endLine": 33,
        "endColumn": 4
    }
}

Complete list of the protocol methods for the v1.0 of the protocol can be found here.

Hidden entities

If you look at the Inspector.json file that defines the protocol schema, you will notice that some of the protocol entities (domains, commands and parameters) are marked as “hidden”. We don’t generate documentation for such entities. Although one can technically use them, we are not yet ready to commit to maintaining their backward compatibility. As the protocol matures, we will be polishing these entities and making them public.

Protocol versioning and backward compatibility

With the revision r106352, we updated the protocol version to v1.0. All subsequent v1.* versions of the protocol are going to be backward compatible with v1.0. Protocol backward compatibility is defined as follows:

No commands or notifications are removed from the protocol.
No required parameters are added to the commands.
No required parameters are removed from command responses or notifications.

We do not anticipate any breaking changes to the protocol any time soon (years), but we leave this possibility to ourselves. We will flip the major version component when such change comes. You can find documentation of all of the versions of the protocol including the tip-of-tree version here.

Enabling remote debugging on your WebKit port

By default, remote debugging is using WebSocket transport for the protocol messages. That’s the transport you need to support in your WebKit port if you want Web Inspector front-end to be able to attach to the running pages. In this mode WebSocket frames are carrying the serialized protocol messages. Note that WebSocket connection is dedicated, there can only be one client attached to the WebKit page at a time.

Using Web Inspector front-end as a remote debugging client

Under the hood, Web Inspector front-end is a web app that can function in a stand-alone mode. It supports ws= query parameter that points to the WebSocket wired to the WebKit backend (it also supports host= and page= parameters that are now deprecated). Some browsers (such as Chrome or Safari) bundle Web Inspector front-end with their distributives, others (Chrome for Android) upload it to the web and point to it.

To see how it works, you can run the Chrome Canary with the following command line flag:

chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222

Then open any other WebKit-based browser and navigate to http://localhost:9222. You will see that initiating the remote debugging session loads the front-end files from the browser. This is possible because Chrome implements a small HTTP server for serving bundled front-end files. But since Web Inspector front-end is just a web app, it can be loaded from any location. Try running Chrome Canary as

chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-debugging-frontend="http://trac.webkit.org/export/head/trunk/Source/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html".

It will tell Chrome to use trac.webkit.org as a source for front-end files. See how entire Web Inspector front-end loads from the source code repository when you inspect one of the tabs. You could have manually navigated to the http://trac.webkit.org/export/head/trunk/Source/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html?ws=localhost:9222/devtools/page/<tab-id> and that would also initiate the debugging session.

Chrome for Android team uses similar approach and uploads a version of Web Inspector front-end to appspot.com with each public build. But now you know, that you can download that site, change the front-end URL to the local one and do remote debugging with no internet connection at all.

Running WebSocket server in your port

In order to use the default Web Inspector front-end for the remote debugging of your WebKit port, you need to implement a small web server supporting the WebSocket specification. We did not make this server code a part of the WebCore because it is up to the embedder to be listening for external connections and discover the inspectable pages. In some cases, socket should operate in a different process than the inspected WebKit instance. For example, in Chrome, the socket is opened by the browser process, and browser dispatches protocol messages to the corresponding WebKit instances running in the renderer processes.

Here is what your WebSocket server needs to do:

Upon accepting the WebSocket connection, it should start a debugging session via calling the InspectorController::connectFrontend() method.
Upon connection termination, it should call InspectorController::disconnectFrontend().
For each incoming WebSocket frame, it should call InspectorController::dispatchMessageFromFrontend(message) with the frame content passed as message.
It should send WebSocket frame over the connection for each InspectorClient::sendMessageToFrontend() callback that it receives from the inspector.

See Chrome light http server and devtools handler for reference.

WebKit2 currently also includes a generic WebSocket server for the inspector. To use it with your port you need to:

Define ENABLE_INSPECTOR_SERVER=1 in Source/WebKit2/config.h and add Source/WebKit2/UIProcess/InspectorServer/* to your build system
Provide an implementation for WebSocketServer::platform*
Start the server by calling WebInspectorServer::listen in the UI process

The server could also be modified to be used without WebKit2, but you would have to tear WebInspectorProxy out of WebInspectorServer and connect InspectorController and InspectorClient yourself to WebInspectorServer.

Last week in WebKit: Network Information API and disabled fieldsets

2012-04-02T17:48:30+00:00

A total of 792 changes landed in WebKit’s repository last week.

Support for IndexedDB in Web Inspector’s Storage Panel is now available by default. Line-endings won’t be reset anymore after editing a file, heap snapshot parsing has been significantly sped up and the shortcut for going to the previous panel has been changed. Development on supporting snippets is ongoing, as is support for device metrics emulation.

After having been rolled out, support for the vw, vh and vmin CSS units has returned to WebKit. Flexbox’ flex-line-pack property has been implemented and two bugs around the flex-pack property have been fixed. Replaced elements now gets pixellated when stretched ” href=”http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/112229″>assume an intrinsic size, the calc() function can now mix percentages and absolute values for gets pixellated when stretched ” href=”http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/112229″>assume an intrinsic size, the calc() function can now mix percentages and absolute values for box-reflect and vertical-align and more progress landed for the new Multiple Column implementation. Finally, CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside and shape-outside had their “wrap-” prefix removed, and now occur in the list of computed style properties.

Support for the Network Information API landed in WebKit, currently only enabled for the EFL port. The “preview” state of the Page Visibility API has been implemented and toggling the “disabled” attribute on a fieldset element will now also effect all form associated elements it contains. Verification for the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header has been made significantly stricter, cross-origin behavior for XMLHttpRequests seeing redirects has been aligned with the specification, and images will now have their error event fired when the CORS check fails.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Running “git status” in a WebKit checkout will be roughly 1.6 times faster due to splitting up the top-level .gitignore and .gitattribute files.
Chromium’s compositor layer sorting system has been rewritten, fixing a lot of outstanding issues on several websites.
WebKit’s build systems are being prepared for upstreaming iOS changes to the public repository.
Performance of creating nodes through JavaScript has been sped up by ~15% for v8.
Support for several new types has been added to SVG’s animVal property.
Color selection dialogs through <input type=color> have been enabled for Chromium.

Color input, the Network Information API and Chromium 20

2012-04-02T13:28:49+00:00

1,104 changes landed in Chromium’s repository last week, whereas WebKit’s received 792. Highlights include Chromium 20, support for <input type=color> and re-landing of the vw, vh and vmin CSS units.

Chromium’s latest version number is the only number with more than one digit that can be written from base 2 to base 20 using only the digits 0 to 9: version 20. Highlights of Google Chrome 19 include support for the CSS calc() function, quote some updates to the Extension APIs and support for mutation observers.

A skeleton of Chromium’s Content Shell for Android landed last week, which is the very first step towards being able to build an Android .apk file containing Chromium. Meanwhile, work on supporting Password Generation is also progressing with some new constraints and a user interface for Linux.

Support for IndexedDB in Web Inspector’s Storage Panel is now available by default. Line-endings won’t be re-set anymore after editing a file, heap snapshot parsing has been significantly sped up and the shortcut for going to the previous panel has been changed. Development on supporting snippets is ongoing, as is support for device metrics emulation.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Running “git status” in a WebKit checkout will be roughly 1.6 times faster due to re-organizing ignores.
Chromium’s compositor layer sorting system has been rewritten, fixing a lot of outstanding issues.
WebKit’s build systems are being prepared for upstreaming iOS changes to the public repository.
Performance of creating nodes through JavaScript has been sped up by ~15% for v8.
Support for several new types has been added to SVG’s animVal property.
Color selection dialogs through <input type=color> have been enabled for Chromium.
Support for meta viewports has been enabled by default for Chromium.
Registering protocol handlers is possible again for Windows 8 users.
Following quite some WebKit work, CSS Shaders can now be enabled on Chromium through a flag!
A new experimental.alarms Extension API has been added, allowing background pages to wake themselves up.
Documentation for the experimental fontSettings and storage Extension APIs is now available.

If you’re one of the people interested in charting Dimitri Glazkov’s average arrival time in the office based on his daily good morning wishes to the #chromium IRC channel, Brett Wilson has the perfect solution for you: 6,143 indexed pages spread over 13 books containing all of 2011′s IRC conversations!

Web. It’s what’s for dinner.

2012-03-26T20:35:04+00:00

GNOME 3.4 is around the corner, and with it a new version of its little web browser that could. This is for sure one of the most action packed releases in a long time, so let’s do a recap of the last 6 months of development.

New UI

The most obvious change at first glance is the refreshed UI, which was already covered in some detail in this blog post. Thanks to the hard work of the GNOME Design Team, the GNOME platform hackers and the Epiphany team we’ve got ourselves a completely new toolbar layout with elegant widgets (I particularly like the linked-style back/forward buttons), support for the new Shell application menu, the demise of our menubar and the debut of our ‘super-menu’ holding the less frequently used page specific actions. Not only the browser works better than ever, it now looks better than ever too.

New History

We have been talking about rewriting our history backend for many years now; to give just one example, as far back as 2007 we already had a Summer of Code project to try to fix some of its shortcomings, which were many. The old backend served us well for almost a decade, but it was showing its age: a difficult to understand legacy codebase, a bus factor of 1 and poorly scalable architecture that made storing more than a couple of weeks of browsing history a titanic task. Last year a crack team at Igalia was put together to fix this once and for all. Enter the new age:

Drop our XML based storage in favor of good ol’ SQLite. Many options were considered other than SQLite, and we could yet again change how things are done internally in the short term, but for the first step we decided to settle on a simple, trusted and performing technology.
Never block the UI. All actual history accesses are done in a special service thread which communicates its results when they are ready to the user interface. This way things will remain responsive and snappy, no matter how complex your queries are or how full to the brim your history is of non-stop reddit browsing.
Test it! User data is the most important thing the application handles, and losing your browsing history is the modern day lobotomy. Our new backend is thoroughly tested through unit tests, so your data is in good hands with us.

Thanks to the new backend we can now provide infinite history storage and instantaneous non-blocking search both in the URL entry and the history window, both long awaited features. Other than that, for 3.4 we tried to keep the UI as it was: one thing at a time. For 3.6, though, now that the we are beautiful on the inside, expect some surprises in how you interact with your history data.

New WebKit

As with every release, on time, we ship with the all new WebKitGTK+ 1.8. As usual there are way too many thing to list and they deserves their own blog post, but you can look forward to: the debut of the WebKit2 API (still experimental but with some modules already using it, like devhelp), WebGL, Accelerated Compositing, HTML5 History API, support for the last version of WebSockets, WebAudio, a rewritten favicon database class and loads and loads of bugfixes and improvements.

Less is more

A constant thought in my mind as a module maintainer is to focus our efforts in delivering the best experience we can given our available resources. I believe as a project, both GNOME and Epiphany, we are now facing the difficult choices successful software must go through at some point: stop trying to be everything for everybody, decide what you want to do and for whom, and try to do that really well.

Our new ongoing redesign is a great step in that direction, and I’m glad that we are finally focusing on what I think really matters. I believe 3.4 is our best release ever, with both cool new features and fixes for old major deficiencies, and things will only get better from here. And, a favorite pet peeve of mine, we did all that while massively cleaning up our codebase to make it cleaner and more hackable, a task without much glamour but a big payoff. Our last release, ignoring translations, icons and help files, comes with 214 modified files, 14,959 insertions and 24,341 deletions. For those keeping the score at home, that’s almost 10,000 lines less of code to maintain, read, patch and load!

Thanks!

Thanks to all the GNOME contributors that made possible this release, but a special thanks must go to Igalia for its continued support for Epiphany. We are not only the best WebKit consultancy around, but we are also putting our money where our mouth is by supporting web technologies in GNOME through its browser and beyond.

Work on 3.6 is already underway, so expect a lot more from your favorite webkittens 6 months from now. Until then, you can follow us on IRC, our mailing list, identi.ca, twitter, facebook or our new project page (wow!). Happy hacking!

WTF’s move, image-set() CSS Function and Cross-Origin Scripts

2012-03-26T19:13:58+00:00

With 901 commits at WebKit, and 1,298 at chromium’s, last week boosted up to a massive 2,199 changes to the repositories. Highlights include a that WTF no longer is part of JavaScriptCore, a new image-set() CSS function and SPDY/3 which can now be enabled through about:flags.

Following much discussion and preparation, including e-mail threads going back more than a year, Eric Seidel moved the WTF (Web Template Framework) code out of JavaScriptCore. It initially settled there in 2005 as the kxmlcore directory, after which it got renamed to WTF in 2006 as many more useful classes had been included there.

JavaScript files and stylesheets will now be editable by default in Web Inspector’s Resources Panel. Highlighting of SVG root elements with a custom viewbox has been fixed and Source Maps may now be defined inline.

An initial implementation of the image-set() CSS function landed in WebKit, as was proposed for the CSS Images Level 4 module last month. Mixed percentage and absolute combinations for calc() may now be used for masks, background positioning and image sizing, Hyatt is working on the new Multiple Column implementation and fieldsets won’t stretch to minimum intrinsic width anymore if an explicit width has been specified. Besides various other Flexible Box Layout changes, the flexing algorithm got updated.

The crossorigin attribute may now be specified on script elements, causing WebKit to apply the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing policy on script elements as well. Three DOM-mutating JavaScript errors have been updated to align with the DOM4 specification and WebSocket’s Sec-WebSocket-Accept may not occur multiple times anymore.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The default WebSocket version to use for WebKit ports has been changed to RFC 6455.
While still completely disabled by default, CSS Shaders can now be compiled for Chromium.
The style sharing optimization can now be applied to elements with style attributes as well.
Support for “magic” iframes within WebKit has been removed.
Several getters have been added to the chrome.browserAction and pageAction APIs.
The Chromium Android builder on the main waterfall now builds all of WebKit.
Tab synchronization in Chromium is now enabled by default for all platforms.
The user interface for <input type=color> landed in Chromium, though is still disabled.
William Chan wrote an excellent article on DNS resolution in Chromium, a flag for which now landed.
The topSites API no longer is experimental and a new experimental offscreenTabs API has been added.
Threaded animation for WebKit’s compositor has been enabled by default on Chromium.
SPDY/3 and the SPDY flow control can now be enabled on the about:flags page.

Finally, if you have interest in Adobe’s recent work on WebKit, they recently hosted a hackathon which yielded some interesting results. It’s a good read!

Last week in WebKit: the move of WTF and responsive CSS images

2012-03-26T18:40:30+00:00

With 901 commits to the various branches on WebKit’s repository, last week brought highlights including the move of WTF and a new CSS property to aid usage of responsive images: image-set().

Other changes which occurred last week:

The default WebSocket version to use for WebKit ports has been changed to RFC 6455.
While still completely disabled by default, CSS Shaders can now be compiled for Chromium.
The style sharing optimization can now be applied to elements with style attributes as well.
Support for “magic” iframes within WebKit has been removed.

Battery Status API, many form changes and animVal for SVG

2012-03-19T19:55:39+00:00

Exactly 1,234 patches landed in the Chromium repository last week, and 751 in WebKit’s, totaling up to 1,985 changes. Highlights include many form-related changes, the Battery Status API and performance improvements.

All signed and float Typed Arrays will now show up as normal arrays in Web Inspector. Taking heap snapshots should now be 12% faster and work is being done in preparation of supporting snippets in the Script Panel. A meta bug covering that work is available on WebKit’s Bugzilla.

CSS parsing now follows the specification when it unexpectedly runs into the end of a file and widths set on a column group won’t affect a column’s width anymore for fixed-layout tables. Three issues with the Flexible Box Layout implementation have been fixed, the “em” unit will be used correctly even when a :first-line pseudo-element changes the size and calc() can now mix percentages and absolute values for gradients and fonts.

The HTML5 meter and progress elements aren’t form-associated anymore, out-of-document radio buttons are now grouped when associated with a form and the form-attribute for labels had its behavior updated. The outer element is now labelable, while hidden input fields have lost that capability. Despite being reverted, support for color inputs seems to be really close for Chromium now.

Samsung has landed an implementation for the Battery Status API, to be enabled on the EFL port. As for Speech Recognition, stubs for WebCore’s controller and the client landed, as well as the SpeechRecognitionEvent part of the API. The MediaStream’s PeerConnection implementation has been deprecated as it’s moving towards a JSEP API. Meanwhile, Nikolas Zimmermann has been busy implementing proper animVal support for SVG.

Besides support for Mozilla’s FullScreen API, WebKit now also supports the very similar W3C Fullscreen API. The primary differences lie in capital usage for the methods and behavior while exiting fullscreen.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Multi-threaded decoding of Theora video content has been enabled for Chromium.
Apple added implementation stubs for IndexedDB on JavaScriptCore, fixing the build.
The HTML5 summary and detail elements have been enabled for the EFL port of WebKit.
A bunch of wallpapers for Aura has been committed to the Chromium repository.
The Page Visibility API and Web Timing API have been enabled for the BlackBerry port.
Dave Hyatt has started moving the Multiple Column implementation to one based on CSS Regions.
WebKit’s Commit Queue will now fast-track patches which already passed on testing EWS bots.
Performance of the blur CSS Filter has been sped up by 2-2.5 times on Chromium.
In true Californian style, Andreas improved memory usage by another 800 kB when viewing the HTML5 spec.
Several performance improvements were made for innerText, outerText, innerHTML and outerHTML.
Visual word movement can now be backed by ICU, providing a simpler and more reliable implementation.
Experimental documentation for the Download API is now available.
Three accessibility improvements landed, one fixing the HTML5 footer element.
Chromium will now invert web content’s colors when the Windows is in high-contrast light-on-dark mode
Quite some UI polishing has been done for the Chrome to Mobile feature.

Two patches to keep an eye out for are work on making CSS Shaders compile on Chromium and a new image-set CSS property. That’s it again!

Last week in WebKit: Battery Status API and form updates

2012-03-19T19:48:12+00:00

Last week, 751 changes landed in the WebKit repository. Highlights include landing of the Battery Status API and support for the W3C version of the Fullscreen API.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The HTML5 summary and detail elements have been enabled for the EFL port of WebKit.
The Page Visibility API and Web Timing API have been enabled for the BlackBerry port.
Dave Hyatt has started moving the Multiple Column implementation to one based on CSS Regions.
Apple added implementation stubs for IndexedDB on JavaScriptCore, fixing the build.
WebKit’s Commit Queue will now fast-track patches which already passed on testing EWS bots.
Performance of the blur CSS Filter has been sped up by 2-2.5 times on Chromium.
Andreas improved memory usage by another 800 kB when viewing the HTML5 specification.
Performance improvements were made for innerText, outerText, innerHTML and outerHTML.
Visual word movement can now be backed by ICU, providing a simpler implementation.
Three accessibility improvements landed, one fixing the HTML5 footer element.

Last week in WebKit: improved calc() support and FlexBox wrapping

2012-03-12T22:42:39+00:00

715 changes landed in WebKit’s repository last week, bringing highlights such as improved calc() support and wrapping behavior for the new Flexible Box Layout implementation.

As for Web Inspector, not all percentage signs will attempt to be substituted anymore, the Network Panel will show application/json data again and inactive properties will be checked for vendor prefixes. The button allowing you to toggle the Timeline Panel’s overview mode has been moved and the Inspector has gotten more efficient at inspecting arrays containing large (~a million) elements.

WebKit’s implementation of the CSS calc() function is now able to mix absolute values and percentages for lengths. The Flexible Box Module’s flex-wrap property has been taught about the “wrap” and ”reverse-wrap” values, and margins won’t be double counted anymore when baseline alignment is used. Finally, multiple values are now accepted for the unicode-bidi CSS property, as an union with bidi-override and isolate is now valid.

Three changes to the JavaScript Speech API have landed, namely the SpeechRecognition(Alternative, Error, Result, ResultList) and the SpeechGrammar(List) interfaces. Support for SVG’s transform-origin attribute has been implemented, getComputedStyle’s result for the height property no longer takes intrinsic paddings into account and rendering of the <shadow> element is now implemented, defining the insertion point for older shadow sub-trees.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Initial code paths have been added in preparation for rendering subtitle cues of the <track> element.
CSS Property getters have been sped up by 35% for JavaScriptCore, and setters by about 8%.
Fierce performance improvements (up to 10.9 times!) for several properties in v8 bindings.
All of JavaScriptCore’s forwarding headers have been removed in favor of accessing WTF directly.
The compositor will now also be enabled following animated CSS Filters.
A WebGL extension enabling anisotropic filters has been added to WebKit.
Support for vw/vh/vmin has been rolled out again due to performance issues.
Jessie Berlin now is a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!

Improved calc() support, Managed Mode and Flexible Box wrapping

2012-03-12T22:38:46+00:00

1,728 changes found their way in the repositories last week, 1,013 for Chromium and 715 for WebKit. Highlights include improved support for -webkit-calc(), Number.isNan/isFinite support in v8 and progress on ES6′s modules.

Work is being started to implement one-click login to Chrome in the browser. In a nutshell, when Chrome isn’t connected to a Google Account and you log in to, for example, GMail, the browser will ask whether you want to synchronize your data to your profile. For now, it’s still disabled by default and is very likely to change. Also new in Chromium is work on a Managed Mode API, which will provide a way to pre-configure, lock and force a certain profile.

WebKit’s implementation of the CSS calc() function is now able to mix absolute values and percentages for lengths. The Flexible Box Module’s flex-wrap property has been implemented, also for reversed wrapping, and margins won’t be double counted anymore when baseline alignment is used. Finally, multiple values are now accepted for the unicode-bidi CSS property, as an union with bidi-override and isolate is now valid.

Within v8, the Object.is() and Number.isNan/isFinite methods have been implemented. Basic infrastructure for JavaScript ES6 modules is available, and the result of Math.sqrt() will now be consistent on Intel platforms.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Initial code paths have been added in preparation for rendering subtitle cues of the <track> element.
CSS Property getters have been sped up by 35% for JavaScriptCore, and setters by about 8%.
Fierce performance improvements (up to 10.9 times!) for several properties in v8 bindings.
All of JavaScriptCore’s forwarding headers have been removed in favor of accessing WTF directly.
The compositor will now also be enabled following animated CSS Filters.
performance.timing.navigationStart will now report the right value on cross-renderer navigation in Chromium.
A WebGL extension enabling anisotropic filters has been added to WebKit.
Support for vw/vh/vmin has been rolled out again due to performance issues.
Within Chromium, Aura is now able to boost up to a consistent 60 FPS rendering.
Jessie Berlin now is a WebKit Reviewer, congratulations!

Thanks for reading

WebKitGTK+ Debian packaging repository changes

2012-03-10T17:32:19+00:00

For a while now the git repository used for packaging WebKitGTK+ has been broken. Broken as in nobody was able to clone it. In addition to that, the packaging workflow had been changing over time, from a track-upstream-git/patches applied one to a import-orig-only/patches-not-applied one.

After spending some more time trying to unbreak the repository for the third time I decided it might be a good time for a clean up. I created a new repository, imported all upstream versions for series 1.2.x (which is in squeeze), 1.6.x (unstable), and 1.7.x (experimental). I also imported packaging-related commis for those versions using git format-patch and black magic.

One of the good things about doing this move, and which should make hacking the WebKitGTK+ debian package more pleasant and accessible can be seen here:

kov@goiaba ~/s/debian-webkit> du -sh webkit/.git webkit.old/.git 27M webkit/.git 1.6G webkit.old/.git

If you care about the old repository, it’s on git.debian.org still, named old-webkit.git. Enjoy!

Jessie Berlin is a WebKit Reviewer!

2012-03-05T22:48:41+00:00

Jessie Berlin has been writing awesome WebKit code and masterfully wrangling WebKit bots for several years now, so I am thrilled to announce that she is now a WebKit reviewer. Maybe you can be lucky enough to have her wrangle your code if you submit a patch!

Congratulations, Jessie!

Last week in WebKit: viewport-relative CSS units and JavaScript Speech

2012-03-05T18:02:07+00:00

755 commits landed in WebKit last week, containing highlights such as support for three new viewport-relative CSS units and work on a JavaScript Speech API.

Style declarations within Web Inspector can now be added anywhere in the declaration rather than just at the end. The DOM counter graphs aren’t experimental anymore, color pickers will be closed when either escape or enter gets pressed and timeline records will be opened when you click on a DOM counter graph. Furthermore, the Profiles panel has been enabled for Web Workers and suggestions will now be given for Watch Expressions.

WebKit now supports an intra-line character grid for Japanese text layouts. The initial value for the -webkit-flow-into CSS property has been changed to “none”, the display type for inline flexboxen is now supported and David Barton is continuing his work on improving MathML support, this time by fixing <msubsup> formatting. The :empty pseudo-selector won’t apply anymore when scripted additions occur, clipping behavior for a fieldset’s <legend> element has been fixed and the :scope pseudo-class is now supported as well.

The Shadow DOM’s ShadowRoot has been taught about the innerHTML property, and the <content> element will now behave like an unknown HTML element when it’s used outside of a Shadow DOM sub-tree. Microdata’s property collections gained the namedItem method and CSS Region’s NamedFlow object now supports the getRegionsByContentNode method. SVG’s <use> element has been integrated with the Shadow Root implementation and work is being done to stop SVG from mutating CSS styles directly.

Joe Thomas landed support for three new CSS units: vw, vh and vmin. These units allow you to define sizes based on the viewport’s width, height or smallest of the two. Following an announcement on webkit-dev, Hans landed an initial patch towards implementing the JavaScript Speech API.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Trailing new-lines will be removed again when pasting text in a single-line text box.
IPP optimizations have been enabled for the Web Audio API’s Biquad filter.
Adrienne Walker is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
Cloning and transferring ArrayBuffers has been implemented for JSC per Khronos’ typed array specification.
Lines containing right-to-left text on Facebook can be selected again.
Very early basics of the new KURLWTFURL URL parser were landed by Benjamin.
The XMLHttpRequest Blob response test on html5test.com will now recognize Chromium.
Layers required for elements which potentially have to hide overflow will now be created lazily.
Plenty of BlackBerry upstreaming has been done again last week.
Working towards date and time input pickers, a HTML-capable popup API has been added.
Smooth Scrolling support has been added for the WebKit GTK port.
The WebKit2 API now features the possibility to suspend and resume timers and animations.

Viewport-relative CSS Units, Speech API and synchronized Extension Settings

2012-03-05T17:56:29+00:00

Another 1,806 changes landed in both repositories last week, 755 for WebKit and 1,051 for Chromium. Highlights include new viewport-relative CSS units, work on a JavaScript Speech API and ..

Within Chromium, a new page on the New Tab Page has been added aiming to provide suggestions of pages to visit, which can be enabled through about:flags if you’d like to follow the progress. As for extensions, Settings will now be synchronized by default, the Font Settings API has received a setFontName method and a sample extension demonstrating the Download API’s download() method is now available.

The Shadow DOM’s ShadowRoot has been taught about the innerHTML property, and the <content> element will now behave like an unknown HTML element when it’s used outside of a Shadow DOM sub-tree. Microdata’s property collections gained the namedItem method and the NamedFlow object for the CSS Region implementation now has the getRegionsByContentNode method. SVG’s <use> element has been integrated with the Shadow Root implementation and work is being done to stop SVG from mutating CSS styles directly.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Trailing new-lines will be removed again when pasting text in a single-line text box.
IPP optimizations have been enabled for the Web Audio API’s Biquad filter.
Adrienne Walker is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
Cloning and transferring ArrayBuffers have been implemented for JSC per Khronos’ typed array spec.
Lines containing right-to-left text on Facebook can be selected again.
Very early basics of the new KURLWTFURL URL parser were landed by Benjamin.
The XMLHttpRequest Blob response test on html5test.com will now recognize Chromium.
Layers required for elements which potentially have to hide overflow will now be created lazily.
Plenty of BlackBerry upstreaming has been done again last week.
Working towards date and time input pickers, a HTML-capable popup API has been added.
CSS Regions can now be enabled again in Chromium, through a flag or about:flags.
Experimental Web Inspector (Developer Tools) features can now be made accessible through about:flags.
A public Dart build master has been made public, mentioning quite some bots already.
More accurate session restore is now available for Chromium by default.
Smooth Scrolling support has been added for the WebKit GTK port.
The WebKit2 API now features the possibility to suspend and resume timers and animations.

And that’ll be all again, cheers for reading.

Adrienne “Enne” Walker is a WebKit reviewer!

2012-02-29T21:52:07+00:00

Adrienne is one of the principal developers of the compositing infrastructure in the Chromium port, and has added major features such as tiling and texture memory management. Enne has also made significant contributions to WebKit’s cross-platform accelerated compositing code, including some tricky bug fixes affecting large web applications.

Please join me in congratulating Adrienne on becoming a WebKit reviewer!

Pwnium: rewards for exploits

2012-02-27T23:47:00+00:00

This year at the CanSecWest security conference, we will once again sponsor rewards for Google Chrome exploits. This complements and extends our Chromium Security Rewards program by recognizing that developing a fully functional exploit is significantly more work than finding and reporting a potential security bug.

The aim of our sponsorship is simple: we have a big learning opportunity when we receive full end-to-end exploits. Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing. This enables us to better protect our users.

While we’re proud of Chrome’s leading track record in past competitions, the fact is that not receiving exploits means that it’s harder to learn and improve. To maximize our chances of receiving exploits this year, we’ve upped the ante. We will directly sponsor up to $1 million worth of rewards in the following categories:

$60,000 - “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

$40,000 - “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

$20,000 - “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

All winners will also receive a Chromebook.

We will issue multiple rewards per category, up to the $1 million limit, on a first-come-first served basis. There is no splitting of winnings or “winner takes all.” We require each set of exploit bugs to be reliable, fully functional end to end, disjoint, of critical impact, present in the latest versions and genuinely “0-day,” i.e. not known to us or previously shared with third parties. Contestant’s exploits must be submitted to and judged by Google before being submitted anywhere else.

Originally, our plan was to sponsor as part of this year’s Pwn2Own competition. Unfortunately, we decided to withdraw our sponsorship when we discovered that contestants are permitted to enter Pwn2Own without having to reveal full exploits (or even all of the bugs used!) to vendors. Full exploits have been handed over in previous years, but it’s an explicit non-requirement in this year’s contest, and that’s worrisome. We will therefore be running this alternative Chrome-specific reward program. It is designed to be attractive -- not least because it stays aligned with user safety by requiring the full exploit to be submitted to us. We guarantee to send non-Chrome bugs to the appropriate vendor immediately.

Drop by our table at CanSecWest to participate and check the latest news.

Posted by Chris Evans and Justin Schuh, Google Chrome Security Team

Last week in WebKit: Vibration API and compressed WebSockets

2012-02-27T19:44:38+00:00

Another 754 commits managed to find their way in WebKit’s repository last week, bringing many updates including support for the Vibration API, WebSocket’s DEFLATE extension and parsing for two CSS Grid Layout properties.

Web Inspector’s Audit Panel gained the ability to warn developers about CSS properties which should be unprefixed. The Ctrl/Cmd {+,-,0} key combinations may now be used to control zooming of the inspector, attributes containing links can now be properly selected in the Elements Panel and, while it’s not enabled by default yet, managing IndexedDB is making visual progress now. Showing re-paint rectangles is now an Inspector option and three patches landed preparing changes in the Timeline Panel, such as the ability to align events by their start time.

Following inflator and deflator classes, WebKit’s WebSocket implementation now supports per-frame compression through the DEFLATE extension. Samsung’s Kihong Kwon landed initial support for the Vibration API. The zero-width joiner (0x200D) and non-joiner (0x200C) characters are now recognized by the JSC and v8 lexers, the PopStateEvent’s state property now equals history’s state property’s value and spin buttons now fire two events.

Initial parsing support for the grid-column and grid-row CSS properties has been added as part of support for the CSS Grid Layout module. <rt> elements won’t inherit the text-decoration property anymore, file upload controls can now stretch to make sure the text fits in the label and the click event for transformed SVG elements now is more reliable.

Apple’s JavaScriptCore is now a triple-tier virtual machine, adding a new low level interpreter which is 2 to 2.5 times as fast as the old one. While performance of the triple-tiering engine is neutral on performance tests, reducing the amount of JIT’ed code delivers strong performance improvements on actual websites.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Style and link elements will now emit load and error events based on whether the stylesheet was successfully loaded.
An empty skeleton of KURL based on WTFURL, a new URL parsing library, has been added.
The requestAnimationFrame mechanism has been enabled for the BlackBerry port.
The drop-shadow() CSS filter can now be applied to composited layers on Chromium.
An IDL attribute checker has been added to the generator, and is now enabled for all ports.
The HTTP Referrer header will now be set when requesting media downloads.
The FractionalLayoutRect type has been added in preparation for sub-pixel layout support.

Scoped Styles, Deflated WebSockets and the Vibration API

2012-02-27T19:37:44+00:00

Last week, 912 commits landed in Chromium and 754 at WebKit, totaling up to 1,666 changes. Highlights include scoped stylesheets, parsing of properties for the Grid Layout and a new interpreter for Apple’s JavaScript engine.

Two new extension APIs have been added to Chromium, namely a fontSettings API which will (so far) allow you to retrieve the font family for a given script, and a Key Bindings API which allows you to register shortcuts triggering events in your extension. An API has been added allowing the Chrome Web Store to install multiple extensions at once, and extensions now also support icons sized either 256×256 or 512×512 pixels.

A command line flag and an about:flags entry have been added to Chromium allowing you to enable support for scoped stylesheets. CSS rules declared in <style scoped> elements will only apply to the subtree rooted at the style element’s parent element, which will prove to be really useful for components and better encapsulation of styles.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Style and link elements will now emit events based on whether the stylesheet was successfully loaded.
Ian Vollick has been busy on implementing support for animations in Chromium’s compositor.
An empty skeleton of KURL based on WTFURL, a new URL parsing library, has been added.
Both IndexedDB as deferred canvas rendering can now be traced through Chromium’s about:tracing.
The requestAnimationFrame mechanism has been enabled for the BlackBerry port.
The drop-shadow() CSS filter can now be applied to composited layers on Chromium.
An IDL attribute checker has been added to the generator, and is now enabled for all ports.
The Page Information button will be replaced with a Website Settings UI, first part landed last week.
The bundled version of Flash will now be enabled by default for 64-bit Linux installations of Chrome.
The HTTP Referrer header will now be set when requesting media downloads.
The FractionalLayoutRect type has been added in preparation for sub-pixel layout support.
Chrome on Android sheriffs now appear on the Chromium Console page.
After allowing a 100 column limit for Java files, Marcus Bulach landed the first Java file!

Last week also happened to be Evan Martin’s last week as a member of the Google Chrome team. Besides having made more than 1,400 commits, Evan has had tremendous impact on the project ever since he started working on it. Thanks, and good luck on your next endeavours!

Last week in WebKit: calculated CSS values and the translate attribute

2012-02-20T23:36:29+00:00

684 commits landed in WebKit’s repository over the course of last week, bringing several new features and improvements such as a color picker for Web Inspector, two new CSS properties and the “translate” attribute for all HTML elements.

Brian Grinstead’s color picker is now enabled by default in WebKit nightlies, following some slight polishing. To aid the undo and redo system, an event has been added to monitor CSS modifications, percentage calculation for empty heap snapshots has been fixed and the first UI for managing IndexedDB databases is available. The free-flow DOM editing experiment has ended, concluding that it wasn’t an optimal solution for highly dynamic pages. Single-click CSS editing got enabled by default, and the Elements Panel will now show previews for images.

Per Mike’s commit, basic usage of CSS’ calc() function have started to work in WebKit. Two new CSS properties have been added, -webkit-line-grid to support the alignment of lines in the inline direction to the line grid and -webkit-overflow-scrolling, indicating that an element with overflow scrolling should follow the platform’s behavior. Nested horizontal flexboxes for the new implementation have been fixed, the nowrap value for the flex-wrap property has been renamed to “none” and the computed style for auto flex-item-align now resolves to its parent’s flex-align.

All HTML elements now support the translate attribute. Support for the DOM Level 3 FocusEvent class has been added and the “types” attribute for HTML5′s drag and drop Clipboard object now returns a DOMStringList. As for CSS Regions, it’s now possible to check whether a named flow overflows and update the regionOverflow property for all elements. Finally, a repaint issue and a text selection issue related to Regions have been fixed as well.

Other changes which occurred last week:

CSS Animations can now be driven through requestAnimationFrame, evading the 40Hz rendering limit.
Following the actual implementation, an API is now available to invert colors on WebKit’s Windows port.
<mark> elements now expose their highlighted state and the <summary>element has been made keyboard accessible.
Certain XMLHttpRequest resources can now be re-used from the memory cache.
Apple’s WebKit ports have switched to using the RFC6455 protocol for WebSockets.
Fat Fingers is now responsible for touch accuracy in BlackBerry’s WebKit port.
Support for CSS Regions is now run-time toggleable, and may be disabled for Chromium.
Scoped selector matching has been implemented in the CSS slow path.

This is the first article in a weekly series highlighting the WebKit changes which occur during during a given week. Of course there are many other changes landing as well, which the Trac Timeline provides a great overview of!

Calculated CSS Values, a Color Picker and the Translate Attribute

2012-02-20T23:30:09+00:00

Another 1,642 changes landed in the repositories last week, 958 for Chromium and 684 for WebKit. Highlights include a color picker for Web Inspector and early functionality for the calc() function.

Brian Grinstead’s color picker is now enabled by default in WebKit nightlies, following some slight polishing. To aid the undo and redo system, an event has been added to monitor CSS modifications, percentage calculation for empty heap snapshotshas been fixed and the first UI for managing IndexedDB databases is available. The free-flow DOM editing experiment has ended, concluding that it wasn’t an optimal solution for highly dynamic pages. Single-click CSS editing did however get enabled by default, and the Elements Panel will now show previews for images.

Other changes which occurred last week:

CSS Animations can now be driven through requestAnimationFrame, evading the 40Hz limit.
Following the actual implementation, an API is now available to invert colors on the Windows port.
Inverting colors is coming to Chromium as well, now supported for non-accelerated content.
<mark> elements now expose their highlighted state and <summary> has been made keyboard accessible.
The right MSAA role for tab-related content will now be set within Chromium.
Certain XMLHttpRequest resources can now be re-used from the memory cache.
Apple’s WebKit ports have also switched over to using the RFC6455 protocol for WebSockets.
The “OK” button will now be focused again in JavaScript dialogs displayed from Chromium.
Fat Fingers is now responsible for touch accuracy in BlackBerry’s WebKit port.
Support for CSS Regions can now be toggled during run-time, and may be disabled for Chromium.
Chromium on Linux will now display the profile avatar or Incognito emblem in the window icon.
Scoped selector matching has been implemented in the CSS slow path.

And that was an update from London again, thanks for reading!

Alejandro García is a WebKit reviewer!

2012-02-20T14:55:07+00:00

In the last couple of years Alex, as we call him, helped with the WebKitGTK+ port maintenance from bugfixing to testing or releasing. He also contributed some improvements to the shadow rendering performance and lately he started the integration of WebKit2 GTK+ port, helping also with the integration of the accelerated compositing in the GTK+ port.

Please join me in congratulating Alejandro on his new role as a WebKit reviewer!

Mutation Observers, Reversed Animations and Faster JPEGs

2012-02-13T23:29:43+00:00

With 995 commits to Chromium’s repository and 754 to WebKit’s, last week brought in another 1,749 changes to the projects. Highlights include Mutation Observers being enabled for all WebKit ports and reversed CSS Animations.

Web Inspector’s Heap Profiler overview screen got some UI improvements and will now show percentages by default next to absolute usage numbers. Hovering over elements with :hover styles defined won’t lock up anymore, the debug side-bar in the Script Panel can now be hidden and DOM edits can now be undone. Brian Grinstead contributed a color picker, bridging the gap until actual <input type=color> gains support. Touch events are now supported by Web Inspector, and can be enabled through the Settings panel.

Mutation Observers have been enabled by default on all WebKit ports. The click() method is now implemented on HTMLElement, making it available for all elements in the DOM. URLs specified in <a ping> won’t be lowercased anymore, the state attribute has been added to the History’s DOM interface and the MediaStream API now supports the onstatechange event for PeerConnection. Finally, the Shadow DOM’s <shadow> element has been added.

Reverse directions for CSS Animations are now available. The calc() function can now, in limited fashion, be used with the hsl() and rgb() functions, and no longer supports the mod operator. Flexboxes can now center and refactorings are being done in preparation of multi-line support. unicode-bidi: plaintext is now supported for inline elements and line-grid-snap has been renamed line-snap.

With 41 commits in total, Haraken did another round of IDL cleanups.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Work on getting CSS Filters to Chromium’s accelerated layers is being done.
Apple has landed support for hardware accelerated CSS Filter animation.
Decoding of JPEG images has been improved by 9% on Chromium.
A framework for WebSocket extensions (i.e. per-frame compression) has landed.
Multisampling for Safari’s WebGL for ATI cards running on Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later.
The score calculations for ranking auto-complete shortcut providers has been updated.
Besides SwiftShader for Windows, Aura seems to be experimenting with LLVMPipe.
WebGL is now able to report errors to Web Inspector’s console.
Due to improved style sharing, certain page cycler tests have been sped up.
Asking Google for spelling suggestions in Chromium is now possible on all platforms.
Directionality for script-triggered dialog boxes has been aligned with the HTML specification.
Lots of updated SVG Tests by WildFox, using a new method to wait for the first draw.
An FFTFrame implementation based on Intel’s IPP library got added.
Chris Rogers is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!

And that’ll be today’s update live from Mountain View .

FOSDEM 2012

2012-02-13T17:11:01+00:00

Last week I was in Belgium, attending the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting — FOSDEM, for short. This conference is held every year and gathers people from all around the globe to discuss and publish FOSS-related matters. Belgian beer, waffles, ~~dutch~~french fries, and sub-zero temperatures were also in the agenda.

Enlightenment Project group photo. Picture by Stefan Schmidt. Guess who I am? (Click to see a larger version.)

I talked briefly about testing in WebKit EFL, after the required tools have been implemented last year, and how it affected the quality of the port. Although I could broadcast what I was there for, the need to improve my public-speaking skills (specially in a foreign language) surely exists; I guess that the only way to improve this is practice. One could say I traveled a long distance just to talk fifteen minutes about software testing, but such places have a lot more to offer.

I’ve met a lot of people this time around (I’ve attended the same conference last year as well): people from the WebKit project (from Qt and GTK+ ports mostly — unfortunately meeting the Mac/Chromium guys in such events is a little bit more complicated), the EFL project, and watched some lectures on interesting subjects, such as domain-specific-languages&LLVM, text input in mobile devices (and how difficult it is), multi-path TCP (very interesting, by the way!), and even saw the ~~old man~~Rasterman talking about ~~Duke Nukem Forever~~EFL to a large audience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to meet people I’d like to meet (the CMake guys, which I talked briefly while working on the WebKit-EFL build system), due to overlapping schedules. Oh, well.

Devices with Tizen were also there if you knew where to look and I was able to play around with them. Despite it still being a little bit rough in the edges (pun intended), I was very impressed by the overall smoothness. Granted that the hardware isn’t too shabby, but it was as snappy as an user interface should be. Can’t wait to get my hands on a Tizen device I can call my own.

I’ve also had the opportunity to drink more Club-Mate in the Brussels Hackerspace (in a new place since last year). Unfortunately my hackerspace passport arrived in the mail a couple days after I left for Europe, so I couldn’t get it properly stamped.

All in all, it was a great experience. I sure hope I’ll be able to attend this conference next year. And last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank my employer, ProFUSION Embedded Systems, for sponsoring my trip.

Expanding the Chromium Security Rewards Program

2012-02-09T17:19:00+00:00

It’s hard for us to believe, but it’s been just over two years since we first announced the Chromium Security Rewards Program.

We’ve been delighted with the program’s success; we’ve issued well over $300,000 of rewards across hundreds of qualifying bugs, all of which we promptly fixed. It also helped inspire a wave of similar efforts from companies across the web, including Google’s own vulnerability reward program for web properties, which has also been a big hit.

We’ve been fascinated by the variety and ingenuity of bugs submitted by dozens of researchers. We’ve received bugs in roughly every component, ranging from system software (Windows kernel / Mac OS X graphics libraries / GNU libc) to Chromium / WebKit code and to popular open source libraries (libxml, ffmpeg). Chromium is a more stable and robust browser thanks to the efforts of the wider security community.

Today we’re expanding the scope of the Chromium program to formally include more items that deserve recognition:

High-severity Chromium OS security bugs are now in scope. Chromium OS includes much more than just the Chromium browser, so we’re rewarding security bugs across the whole system, as long as they are high severity and present when “developer mode” is switched off. Examples of issues that may generate a reward could include (but are not limited to):

Renderer sandbox escapes via Linux kernel bugs.
Memory corruptions or cross-origin issues inside the Pepper Flash plug-in.
Serious cross-origin or memory corruption issues in default-installed apps, extensions or plug-ins.
Violations of the verified boot path.
Web- or network-reachable vulnerabilities in system libraries, daemons or drivers.

Chromium OS security bugs should be reported in the Chromium OS bug tracker, whilst security bugs affecting the desktop Chromium browser should be reported in the Chromium bug tracker.

We may elect to issue “bonuses” ranging from $500 to $1000 if a bug reporter takes on fixing the bug they have found themselves. For eligibility, this process involves working with the Chromium community to produce a peer reviewed patch. These bonuses are granted on top of the base reward, which typically runs between $500 and $3133.70.

The base reward for a well-reported and significant cross-origin bug (for example a so-called UXSS or “Universal XSS”) is now $2000.

Perhaps most importantly, this program reflects several of our core security principles: engaging the community, building defense in depth, and particularly making the web safer for everyone.

Related to this third core principle, we’re particularly excited by all the work that has been done on shared components. For example, a more robust WebKit not only helps users of two major desktop browsers, but also a variety of tablet and mobile browsers.

Posted by Chris Evans, Google Chrome Security

Chris Rogers is a WebKit Reviewer!

2012-02-07T23:32:20+00:00

Chris Rogers is the author of the Web Audio API specification and the primary implementor of it in WebKit. Chris has also contributed to the XHR2 specification (the .responseType and .response attributes), and implemented these attributes in WebKit.

Please join me in congratulating Chris on his new role as a WebKit reviewer!

A deeper look at Chrome for Android

2012-02-07T17:38:00+00:00

Today, we introduced Chrome for Android Beta, which brings Chrome’s capabilities to phones and tablets running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. This is made possible by a range of innovative features and by building a mobile browser from the ground up that makes full use of the underlying architecture built into Android 4.0.

Chrome for Android brings support for many of the latest HTML5 features to the Android platform. With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices.

In addition to support for the latest web technologies, we hope to make interactive web content super easy to develop. Chrome for Android introduces remote debugging through Chrome Developer Tools to make it simple for developers to debug web sites running live on their mobile devices.

Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects.

We’ve got a lot more planned to make Chrome as feature-rich on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. We encourage you to follow any of the ongoing development via the issue tracker or join in on chromium-dev@chromium.org.

Posted by Arnaud Weber, Engineering Manager, Chrome

Chromium 19, Scoped Stylesheets and IDL Refactoring

2012-02-06T21:11:32+00:00

1,368 changes found their way to the repositories last week, 802 for Chromium and 566 for WebKit. Highlights include Chromium 19, an Extension Activity Log page and no more high-latency audio code path.

The branch for Google Chrome 18 has been created, giving Anthony a cause to remind us about Potassium while kicking Chromium’s version 19. Approximately 6,500 Chromium, 4,400 WebKit commits and 300 v8 commits participated in this release, giving a combined total of over 11 thousand changes. Chrome 18 brings six new stable extension APIs, a CSS Selector Profiler, Mutation Observers and many, many more changes.

Work has been started on an Extension Activity Log page which will share information about API calls a certain extension makes, allowing you to keep an eye out on their behavior.

Web Inspector’s Heap Inspector is now able to show a percentage-based representation of memory usage for objects as well. The protocol version has been increased to 1.0, getting an XPath query for an item in the DOM will soon be supported and an experiment for editing styles after a single click has been started. Finally, it’s now also possible to select BlackBerry’s UA strings in the Inspector’s switcher. Work on supporting touch event emulation is progressing.

Support for fixed and percentage-based minimum widths on table elements with table-layout: auto has been implemented, and styling background colors in regions has been re-enabled as well. The preload scanner will now take the base element into account and the disabled attribute on SVG style elements is now supported.

Albeit disabled by default through a compile-time flag, basic functionality of scoped stylesheets has started working per Ronald’s commit. Limitations for selector matching in the <content> element’s select attribute are now being verified, backgrounds inside SVG’s foreignObject element will now be drawn, the Content-Language value (meta-only for now) will influence the document’s locale and fonts and SVG’s getIntersectionList method won’t cause visual distortion anymore.

Through 19 different commits, Kentaro Hara has been doing a great job cleaning up IDL files throughout WebKit .

Other changes which occurred last week:

The Dromaeo bench-mark has been checked in to WebKit and will be used for performance measuring.
The WebKit Mac-port Early Warning System bot is now available for all contributors.
Michael Saboff and Vsevolod Vlasov are now WebKit reviewers, congratulations!
A user’s preferred language may now be taken into account when choosing the right subtitles.
WebKit’s GStreamer-based Web Audio implementation is no longer dependent on FFTW.
It is now possible to build Samsung’s WebKit EFL port with support for WebGL.
Chromium has been taught about Deferred Canvas Rendering, through Skia’s SkDeferredCanvas.
Andreas has killed per-Attribute style declarations and saved another 412 kB of memory.
Antti has been refactoring CSS, splitting WebKit’s internal and external style declarations.
A command line flag has been added to Chromium to enable the Shadow DOM.
The Extension Storage API has been moved back to experimental for Chrome 18.
All Chromium OS bots and builds will now be using the Aura interface.
The high-latency audio code path has been removed from Chromium.
CSS Filters have been enabled for WebKit’s Windows port.

And that’s all again!

Heap usage of QtWebKit

2012-02-03T08:25:00+00:00

In this post I would like to share with you one of my latest memory consumption measurements about the heap usage of QtWebKit.
We have a nice extension for Valgrind called Freya which is capable of measuring used memory in per directory. So, I decided to make measurements about the distribution of memory consumption in JavaScriptCore and WebCore and publish the results about the peak memory usage and the overall memory usage.

Shadow DOM, Pointer Lock and a new CSS Lexer

2012-01-30T18:13:14+00:00

929 changes landed at Chromium’s repository last week, whereas WebKit’s received 626, totaling up to 1,555. Highlights include quite some progress on implementing the Shadow DOM and the Pointer Lock API.

Web Inspector’s Timeline Panel has been extended with three graphs, all hidden behind the Experimental Settings option, showing information about objects and events in the DOM. Hovering over a function in the Script Panel may now show an overlay with general information and it’s source-code and elements within iframes are selectable again.

The Flexible Box module implementation has been taught about distributed packing and now supports scrollbars for overflowing content, also taking the flex direction into account. Furthermore, floated pseudo-elements within table captions will now be positioned correctly.

In order to verify whether ES.next’s let keyword will be compatible with websites, Apple has reserved the word from normal usage in JavaScriptCore. Support for Uint8ClampedArray has landed for both V8 as JSC, values for the dropzone attribute will be normalized and various issues with radio-button groups have been fixed.

In terms of the Shadow DOM, registering of scoped stylesheets with the scoped element has been implemented and an initial version of the <content> element is now available as well. Following an API change and the actual interface, Vincent Scheib’ Pointer Lock API has made it into Chrome Canary as well.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Zoltan Herczeg wrote a custom CSS Lexer for WebKit, doubling lexing performance!
The parsing stage of calc() has landed in WebKit, following several new tests.
The JavaScriptGlue folder in WebKit’s Source/ directory has been removed.
WebKit’s Qt port now features tap feedback respecting the tap-highlight-color property.
Parsing of the Content-Disposition HTTP header has been improved, aligning more closely to RFC 6266.
Ryosuke is working on bringing performance tests to WebKit, to be visualized using Mozilla’s Graph server.
Elements without attributes are slightly smaller, resulting in another ~0.23% memory improvement.
Styles won’t be updated synchronously anymore after running a script.
An about:flags entry has been added for enabling the Media Stream API, including getUserMedia.
Another flag has been added to disable the GPU for accelerated rendering, falling back to software mode.
A debug page for the Omnibox has been added as chrome://omnibox/.
Storage Quotas are now available through the Extension Storage API, as the getBytesInUse method.
An Extension API event informing about brightness changes has been implemented for Chromium OS.
The Privacy Extension API has been moved out of the experimental namespace, as has the Storage API.

And that’ll be all again, thanks for reading!

Github Archive Now Available

2012-01-27T23:47:20+00:00

Based on popular request, I've published my full build tree for generating the WinCairoRequirements bundle needed to build the WinCairo port.

You can access it at Github.

It contains build targets for:

VS2005, which is needed for compatibility with the main WebKit development effort.
VS2008, which I used on my last shipping application, and
VS2010 for new development.

While I was at it, I also published CallJS, an example application exercising theWebKit framework, and provides an example of doing things like communicating between a WinApi application and the WebKit and JavaScriptCore instances.

Hopefully, these resources will make it easier for people to get started using, and perhaps contributing, to WebKit.

If you do try them out, please drop me a line and let me know if you had any difficulties.

Vsevolod Vlasov is a WebKit Reviewer!

2012-01-27T13:08:02+00:00

Vsevolod Vlasov has been a major contributor to the recent improvements to the Web Inspector. Please join me in congratulating Vsevolod on his new role as a WebKit reviewer!

Making form-filling faster, easier and smarter

2012-01-25T18:37:00+00:00

One of my favorite features of Chrome got a boost earlier today, as we announced support for an experimental new “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields. The new attribute will allow web developers to unambiguously label text and select fields with common data types such as ‘full-name’ or ‘street-address’ and guarantee that their site’s forms work correctly with Chrome Autofill and other form-filling providers.

We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.

For more information, you can read the full text of the proposed specification, ask questions on the Webmaster help forum, or you can share your feedback in the standardization discussion!

Posted by Ilya Sherman, Software Engineer

Content Shell, Shadow DOM and Emulating Screen Sizes

2012-01-23T18:14:31+00:00

Last week brought 563 new commits in WebKit’s repository and 709 new commits to Chromium’s, totalling up to 1,272 changes. Highlights include a content shell for Chromium and work on emulating screen sizes.

Chromium’s content shell for Linux-based systems was announced on the chromium-dev mailing list on Friday, sharing the news that it’s now usable for day-to-day WebKit development. It uses Chromium’s content module but leaves out other parts of the browser, so it’ll be significantly faster to compile and run.

For free-flow HTML editing in the Resources Panel of Web Inspector, revisions will now be tracked. Unsafe cross-origin requests will now show a stack trace in the console, making them easier to track down and content in iframes won’t appear to be in the same document anymore when using the DOM Viewer. Finally, a screen-size emulation back-end has been implemented, which will eventually allow you to emulate mobile device screens!

The -webkit-cross-fade will now report the intrinsic size of the background, fixing rendering when the background-size property is being used. Baseline grid alignment has been implemented, as have the text-overflow property for input fields and parsing for the custom() function of CSS Shaders. Painting background colors for regions has been re-enabled, and regions will now be exposed to the DOM.

WebKit’s Device Orientation implementation has been updated with the absolute property, which indicates whether the angles in the event are absolute. The abort() method for Application Cache has been added, as has a constructor for MediaStream accepting a collection of MediaStreamTracks. A window’s innerWidth and innerHeight properties won’t be affected by page scales anymore and drop and dragend events will now be issued for contentEditable elements.

Finally, the first significant patch in exposing the Shadow DOM to JavaScript has landed in WebKit! Minor as it is right now, it’ll pave the path to implementing the rest of the specification.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Hardware accelerated brightness and contrast filters have been implemented for Safari.
IndexedDB has also been made supplemental and moved out of DOMWindow.cpp.
Values of the Access-Control-Request-Headers header will now be send in lowercase.
Another 0.8 MB of memory will be saved when viewing some random version of the HTML Specification.
A special honorable mention for this immediately obvious commit message.
Software-based 3D rendering can be disabled through about:flags now.
Documentation of several Web Inspector-related Extension APIs is no longer experimental either.
The experimental Settings Extension API now understands the unlimitedStorage permission as well.
The headers and body of HTTP requests will now be merged if the total length is <1400 characters.
The Network Action Predictor (chrome://network-action-predictor) now features probability filtering.

Finally, be sure to take a look at HTML5 Please, a new website sharing recommendations about which features of the Web Platform can be used today!

Epiphany marches on

2012-01-17T15:56:06+00:00

Previously in this space we saw how the bright future of Epiphany looked like, and vague promises about incremental steps towards it were done. A month later, Epiphany 3.3.4 is out there, so let’s see how well we’ve done.

There’s a lot of new stuff here, so let’s go step by step.

Application menu

The application menu, accessible from its usual location in the Shell, holds actions that affect the entire application as opposed to the currently focused window or tab. You’ll need a fairly recent version of the Shell and gnome-settings-daemon (3.3.4 of both should do, when they are out) to get it working, otherwise the browser will fallback to a lonely “Application” entry in a now deserted menubar.

Also, notice that we now brand ourselves as “Web” in all user visible strings.

New toolbar

The bulk of the changes are here. As you can see the Back and Forward buttons have been visually merged, a fate shared by the location entry and the reload/stop button. The entire menubar is gone, being replaced by a “super menu” triggered by the funny looking button with a gear (more on this later). Everything else that used to be in the default toolbar layout is now gone, as is the ability to edit its contents, making the concept of a default layout more dramatic. Finally, we use a new style for the toolbar, making it seamlessly merge with the window decoration. We think it looks great!

Super menu

In the quest to save as much vertical space as possible in the default layout we have moved all the remaining actions of our menubar into a side “super menu”. Here will live actions related to the current page, although for the moment we have some visitors there en route to their new destination (like the Bookmarks menu, which will live in the new Overview).

The devil is in the details

A lot of other small tweaks and cleanups have happened, too many to mention. From a renewed floating statusbar (now shared with Nautilus), to spacing tweaks, to more thorough use of symbolic icons throughout the UI. Special thanks go to the Design Team, it’s a pleasure to work with them in both the small details and in the big picture re-designs.

Also, one benefit of having a renewed design focus is that it allows you to do this:

135 files changed, 14988 insertions(+), 26958 deletions(-)

Around 12,000 lines of code have been deleted since 3.3.2; the biggest chunk comes from the demise of EphyToolbarEditor and friends, but in other places we have just managed to do the same, or more, with less. This means more energy devoted to make Epiphany really good at what it should be doing, which is what every core GNOME application should aspire to do.

More to come

This is only the beginning, not the end. The Epiphany team will now continue full steam ahead to implement the new Overview, merge the new SQLite history backend, port our extension system to libpeas and many other exciting features, maybe including some surprise gift in the Web Application camp. Stay tuned to this space and, as usual, happy hacking!

Font CSS Properties, Selector Source Location and calc() Tests

2012-01-16T19:01:46+00:00

Exactly 1,500 changes landed last week, 890 for Chromium and 610 for WebKit, bringing changes such as some usability updates in the CSS Profiler and new font-related CSS properties.

The experimental Sidebar Extension API has been removed from Chromium. The Downloads Extension API gained an getFileIcon method and now also works for POST-download requests, and Panels may now be resized and spawned without drawing attention using the chrome.windows API. chrome.experimental.dns made its entry.

Early steps in supporting IndexedDB in Web Inspector have been made and a “source” column has been added to the CSS Profiler, directly pointing out the offending CSS rule.
As part of an ongoing effort in WebKit, several failing tests on the IE Testcenter have been fixed. Among these are executing prepared scripts even when they’ve been removed from the DOM and sandboxed i-frames will now block the autofocus attribute if the sandbox flags request it.

WebKit now also supports getting the computed style for border-radius properties. Four compliance improvements have been made to JavaScriptCore, namely that defineOwnProperty is now available for arrays, changes around the length property for arrays, defineProperty and handling of colons in timezones. Finally, the navigator.startActivity method for Web Intents has been implemented, albeit behind a compile-time guard.

Following a specification change, the flex-align CSS property has been renamed to flex-item-align and a new version of flex-align has been implemented, and the implementation has been taught about handling absolutely positioned elements within flexboxes. Color matrix-based filters will now be done by Skia for Chromium, and the serpia tone filter has been aligned color-wise for Mac OS X. Text decorations won’t propagate to all descendants anymore and several more element types can now render outlines.

Two new CSS properties were implemented. The font-kerning property from the CSS Fonts specification will allow you to define kerning behavior, and the initial implementation of the font-variant-ligatures property will allow you to explicitly enable or disable OpenType’s common ligatures feature on a font.

Other changes which occurred last week:

A basic content-shell has been added for Linux, part of the Content API refactoring.
Another eight patches have been landed by Mike Lawther containing lots of new CSS3 calc() tests.
Preparations are being made in the WebGL implementation to allow sharing resources.
Calculating collapsed borders will now be done less often, resulting in a performance improvement.
Injecting a stylesheet with only scoped selectors will now only invalidate the sub-tree.
A JavaScript error-event will be emitted when a full-screen request has been rejected.
Speech input will now be send to the right element, even if the focus has changed.
Radio-button group selection will now only apply to the actual document they’re in.
The WebIDL [Supplemental] IDL has been used to begin modularizing WebSQL.

Some interesting things currently going on include a Baidu contribution and basic grid alignment from the CSS Line Grid specification.

Media Fragments, Performance and MediaElementAudioSourceNode

2012-01-11T11:38:21+00:00

The new year’s first week ended calmly, bringing in 547 commits to WebKit and 650 to Chromium. Highlights include support for temporal dimensions for media files, alignment of Safari’s JavaScript engine with ES5 and lots of performance improvements.

Engadget, among other sites, has become significantly faster in WebKit, now using 10% less CPU over the entire page load due to analyzing inline stylesheet scopes. A CSS Selector using multiple indirect adjacency combinators won’t be able to be superlinear anymore, inserting nodes into the DOM has been sped up and several other tweaks were implemented.

Sanitization of non-parsable strings in date and time input boxes is now possible in WebKit, emptying the value if an invalid value has occurred. The </script>-close tag will now be properly highlighted in View Source, and horizontal paddings and borders will be used instead of vertical ones for a CSS table’s fixed width.

Safari’s JavaScript engine aligned its behavior closer to the ECMAScript specification. The JSON object is now configurable, the parseInt method won’t parse octal numbers anymore, ThrowTypeError is now a singleton and date parsing has been made more liberal. Alexis Menard implemented getComputedStyle output for the outline, border, list-style, border-image and background properties. Finally, the Web Audio API is now able to integrate with audio and video elements throught the MediaElementAudioSourceNode object!

Eric Carlson implemented the temporal dimension portion of the Media Fragments URI specification. This allows you to append a formatted hash-string to any media file’s URL selecting which portion of the file should be played. For example, this plays the fourth until the twelfth second: video.webm#t=4,12.

Other changes which occurred last week:

Initial sets of layout tests for the CSS3 calc() function are being committed, pending the feature itself.
Web Inspector now also allows you to modify HTML content through the Resources Panel.
The WebKit build-bot console page now displays builders based on their port.
The BlackBerry WebKit Port has enabled the download attribute.

And that’ll be all for now! Lets get back on the Monday-track for updates starting next week!

CSS Selector Profiler, Source Mapping and Software Rendering

2012-01-03T14:58:53+00:00

Happy New Year! Since I didn’t publish an update last week, this one will cover all 680 WebKit and 986 Chromium commits made in the past two weeks. Highlights include a ton of Web Inspector changes, Jarred’s work on XMLHttpRequest and access to new JavaScript features through about:flags.

Besides support for true hardware acceleration, which pretty much is a requirement for features such as WebGL and CSS 3D Transforms, attention is also being given to software renderers. Several crashes for Apple’s OpenGL-software renderer have been fixed, and support for SwiftShader has been added for Windows installations, which will automatically be downloaded if support for GPU-based WebGL is blacklisted. While performance definitely won’t be en par with GPU-based WebGL, it’s a good solution for those on older systems.

The Web Inspector team landed some great new features, most notable of which is the CSS Selector Profiler. Available through the Profiles Panel in the Inspector, it will show the number of matches for a certain element and its contribution to the total style matching run-time. Two other new features, both displayed in the image below, are the ability to dock the Web Inspector to the right-side of the browser window (through the Settings window) and an experimental tabbed interface for the Script Panel.

New, experimental Web Inspector features will be hidden behind a command line flag and a setting. Tree views in side-bars cannot be collapsed anymore using the keyboard and subsequent @rule-statements in CSS will be highlighted. The ability to remove all breakpoints has been added, as has a cool Go To Function dialog. Finally, Web Inspector gained support for Source Mapping through the X-SourceMap HTTP header. When enabled (also through the Settings window), an Install Source Map context-menu item will be added to scripts in the Script Panel.

On Chromium’s side for Web Inspector, both the chrome.devtools and the chrome.debugger Extension APIs graduated from being experimental, so hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot of extensions starting with Chrome 18!

WebKit’s HTML5 parser has received a number of updates, which include support for the Noah’s Ark condition, 93 named entities which expand to more than a single character and some minor fixes related to NULL characters in HTML content. Video subtitles through the <track> element can now be rendered on a video, and subtitles will be enabled for WebKit-mac builds, meaning Safari. Finally, the dropzone attribute got aligned with the specification.

The XMLHttpRequest implementation has also been updated, which now compares the mime-types in a case insensitive way, gained support for the loadend event and allows more liberal modification of the withCredentials and responseType attributes. More excitingly, new response types (such as json) won’t support synchronous requests in a non-worker scope anymore. Two more init*Event methods have been removed, and retrieving the computed style of the border-style, border-color and margin properties has been implemented.

Default styling of the strong and b elements has been updated to be bold rather than bolder. CSS Filters may now be used on inline elements, the blur filter will now invalidate the entire element and animating brightness, contrast and drop-shadow filters won’t be reversed anymore, and two more issues with full CSS 2.1 support have been fixed.

Other changes which occurred during these weeks:

Enabling the JavaScript ES.Next features (“Harmony”) in v8 is now possible through about:flags.
Another feature which can now be enabled on about:flags are hardware accelerated CSS Filters.
Chromium’s text rendering will now be done through Skia, instead of directly rendering with GDI.
WebKit will now use 2.3 megabytes less memory when displaying the full HTML5 specification.
Several HTML Collections will now be cached, also making reddit a whole lot more usable.
The about:flags page will now show all experiments for all platforms (thanks, tbreisacher!)
Panels on Chromium for Windows now have an overflow indicator count.
A command line flag for experimental Web Inspector features has been added.
As a next step in the content-API refactoring, work on WebContents has been started.
Documentation for the WebRequest Extension API has been improved.

And that’s all again. Two bugs to keep an eye out for this week are updated patches for CSS calc()’s parsing and the beforeprint and afterprint events.

Filip Pizlo is a WebKit Reviewer!

2011-12-20T00:13:19+00:00

Filip Pizlo has been a major contributor to the recent improvements to the JavaScriptCore JIT and Garbage Collector. Please join me in congratulating Filip on his new role as a WebKit reviewer!

Reversed Lists, Animatable Filters, CSS Shaders and secure SSL

2011-12-19T17:57:53+00:00

Another 1,492 commits have been added to the projects; 826 to Chromium and an evil 666 to WebKit. Highlights include support for <ol reversed>, lots of changes for CSS Filters and rendering CSS Shaders.

Going forth in improving security in the browser, Chromium will now display a fatal error when it encounters pages using SSL certificates signed with the MD2 and MD4 hashing algorithms, and will display an interstitial warning page for certificates signed with MD5. Certificates with RSA and DSA keys of less than 1024 keys will also be rejected.

Within Web Inspector, a sidebar has been added to the Script Panel displaying the included scripts on by their host. A large amount of internal properties of objects using the Detailed Heap Snapshot tool have been hidden and hex-colors with just three characters will now be highlighted.

As for specification related updates, Adam Barth made sure that six recent changes to the HTML5 parsing algorithm reflect in WebKit’s implementation. Clickable controls such as form fields may now be used as a <detail> element summary and cancelRequestAnimationFrame has been renamed to cancelAnimationFrame. Numbered lists can now be reversed using the reverse-attribute and XMLHttpRequest.responseXML now supports HTML documents.

A large amount of work has been done on the CSS Filter implementation. Filters are now animatable, they will affect visual overflow and several filters will now accept percentages as values. Finally, the implementation has been aligned with the specification and they can now be hardware accelerated, with an implementation for Apple’s Safari. Filters are now enabled for Chromium, and despite the security concerns, rendering CSS Shaders is now possible in WebKit builds which have the feature enabled!

Other changes which occurred last week:

Information about changes to Extension APIs for Chrome 16 has been documented.
Pausing, resuming and cancelling downloads are now possible through the Download API.
Support for hardware-based video decoding has been implemented, only enabled on Chrome OS.
The QtWebKit port now has support for the requestAnimationFrame API.
New-lines in text-areas will now be counted as two characters for all platforms.
The Chromium-API part of color input boxes has been implemented.
Two more important performance improvements to the Web Audio API, contributed by Intel.
A series of general clean-up and memory improvement patches from Andreas “printf” Kling.
A significant memory improvement for Windows, sometimes yielding 5% improvement.
Another 4% speed-up on Kraken for Apple’s new DFG JIT.
Visited link hashes will now be cached, speeding up the total CPU usage on the HTML5 spec by 1%.

Since next Monday happens to be Boxing Day, I’ll publish a (probably brief) update the day after, Tuesday the 27th. Thank you for reading and have a Merry Christmas!

Animatable Background Images, Mutation Observers and !important

2011-12-12T18:21:02+00:00

With 912 commits at Chromium and 590 at WebKit, totaling up at 1,502 changes, a fair amount of changes have happened again. Highlights include Mutation Observers for Chromium and animatable background images.

Chromium has reached a version number which equals a pentagonal pyramidal number: 18. In total, 7,107 Chromium commits, 4,198 WebKit commits and 526 v8 commits are included, totaling up to 11,831 changes for the Google Chrome 17 release, besides changes in other related projects such as Skia and NaCL.

Mutation Observers have been enabled for Chromium, which provide a much better alternative to DOM Mutation Events. Though still disabled by default, Chromium has been taught how to handle meta viewport elements, the scoped attribute for scoped stylesheets landed, table cells now understand widths in percentages and security around loading out-of-band text tracks has been improved by utilizing CORS.

WebKit now supports animations between background, border and list images utilizing the cross-fade() function which landed a few weeks ago. Parsing for multiple grid rows and columns has been added, as has parsing for the wrap and wrap-reverse values for the flex-flow property.

As a first step in being able to CSS Regions, background colors will now be applied. The behavior of !important in inline style sets has been aligned with the specification, automatic color adjustments for disabled input elements has been removed for Chromium and various more CSS 2.1 test failures have been fixed.

Other changes which occurred last week:

The Screen, Terminal and VT100 classes, all part of an HTML-based terminal emulator, landed.
A shutdown option has been added to Chromium OS’ wrench menu.
Chromium Profile avatars will now be displayed in Windows profile-specific shortcuts.
The three-step animation for panel minimizing is now also implemented for Linux.
Safari using the WebKit2 API will stop the system and display from going to sleep mode.
An initial implementation of accelerated compositing for WebKitGTK was committed, using Clutter.
Web Inspector audits can now be stopped while they’re in-progress.
Intel’s Xingnan Wang sped up the Web Audio API’s sample convolving by 70 percent.
Support for a high-contrast mode for bubbles has been added.
The aria-hidden attribute will now be working correctly for iframe elements.
Support for Panels has been moved behind a flag again, except for Dev and Canary releases.
The WebUI Task Manager is now enabled by default again, and will persist its window size.
Work on GPU accelerated Filters has started in Chromium, behind the –enable-accelerated-filters flag.
By adding a binding, CSS Filters can be used in Chromium by compiling with ENABLE_CSS_FILTERS=1.
Moving the caret on Windows will now move in visual order rather than in logical order.
Some performance pain-points for scrolling on YouTube have been addressed.
Two recent Apple hires (NSFW) seem to have started with upstreaming parts of the iOS port.
Yours truly is now a WebKit committer.

And that’ll be all for last week again. Things to keep an eye out for this week include

UI WebKit chromium part ” href=”https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65897″>work on supporting , a new patch for a UI WebKit chromium part ” href=”https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65897″>work on supporting , a new patch for a UI WebKit chromium part ” href=”https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65897″>work on supporting <include type=color>, a new patch for a custom written CSS Lexer and work by Simon Fraser to make the CSS Filter property animatable!

WebKitGTK+ hackfest \o/

2011-12-07T23:34:58+00:00

It’s been a couple days since I returned from this year’s WebKitGTK+ hackfest in A Coruña, Spain. The weather was very nice, not too cold and not too rainy, we had great food, great drinks and I got to meet new people, and hang out with old friends, which is always great!

Hackfest black board, photo by Mario

I think this was a very productive hackfest, and as usual a very well organized one! Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for the travel sponsorship, to our friends at Igalia for doing an awesome job at making it happen, and to Collabora for sponsoring it and granting me the time to go there! We got a lot done, and although, as usual, our goals list had many items not crossed, we did cross a few very important ones. I took part in discussions about the new WebKit2 APIs, got to know the new design for GNOME’s Web application, which looks great, discussed about Accelerated Compositing along with Joone, Alex, Nayan and Martin Robinson, hacked libsoup a bit to port the multipart/x-mixed-replace patch I wrote to the awesome gio-based infrastructure Dan Winship is building, and some random misc.

The biggest chunk of time, though, ended up being devoted to a very uninteresting (to outsiders, at least), but very important task: making it possible to more easily reproduce our test results. TL;DR? We made our bots’ and development builds use jhbuild to automatically install dependencies; if you’re using tarballs, don’t worry, your usual autogen/configure/make/make install have not been touched. Now to the more verbose version!

The need

Our three build slaves reporting a few failures

For a couple years now we have supported an increasingly complex and very demanding automated testing infrastructure. We have three buildbot slaves, one provided by Collabora (which I maintain), and two provided by Igalia (maintained by their WebKitGTK+ folks). Those bots build as many check ins as possible with 3 different configurations: 32 bits release, 64 bits release, and 64 bits debug.

In addition to those, we have another bot called the EWS, or Early Warning System. There are two of those at this moment: one VM provided by Collabora and my desktop, provided by myself. These bots build every patch uploaded to the bugzilla, and report build failures or passes (you can see the green bubbles). They are very important to our development process because if the patch causes a build failure for our port people can often know that before landing, and try fixes by uploading them to bugzilla instead of doing additional commits. And people are usually very receptive to waiting for EWS output and acting on it, except when they take way too long. You can have an idea of what the life of an EWS bot looks like by looking at the recent status for the WebKitGTK+ bots.

Maintaining all of those bots is at times a rather daunting task. The tests require a very specific set of packages, fonts, themes and icons to always report the same size for objects in a render. Upgrades, for instance, had to be synchronized, and usually involve generating new baselines for a large number of tests. You can see in these instructions, for instance, how strict the environment requirements are – yes, we need specific versions of fonts, because they often cause layouts to change in size! At one point we had tests fail after a compiler upgrade, which made rounding act a bit different!

So stability was a very important aspect of maintaining these bots. All of them have the same version of Debian, and most of the packages are pinned to the same version. On the other hand, and in direct contradition to the stability requirement, we often require bleeding edge versions of some libraries we rely on, such as libsoup. Since we started pushing WebKitGTK+ to be libsoup-only, its own progress has been pretty much driven by WebKitGTK+’s requirements, and Dan Winship has made it possible to make our soup backend much, much simpler and way more featureful. That meant, though, requiring very recent versions of soup.

To top it off, for anyone not running Debian testing and tracking the exact same versions of packages as the bots it was virtually impossible to get the tests to pass, which made it very difficult for even ourselves to make sure all patches were still passing before committing something. Wow, what a mess.

The explosion^Wsolution

So a few weeks back Martin Robinson came up with a proposed solution, which, as he says, is the “nuclear bomb” solution. We would have a jhbuild environment which would build and install all of the dependencies necessary for reproducing the test expectations the bots have. So over the first three days of the hackfest Martin and myself hacked away in building scripts, buildmaster integration, a jhbuild configuration, a jhbuild modules file, setting up tarballs, and wiring it all in a way that makes it convenient for the contributors to get along with. You’ll notice that our buildslaves now have a step just before compiling called “updated gtk dependencies” (gtk is the name we use for our port in the context of WebKit), which runs jhbuild to install any new dependencies or version bumps we added. You can also see that those instructions I mentioned above became a tad simpler.

It took us way more time than we thought for the dust to settle, but it eventually began to. The great thing of doing it during the hackfest was that we could find and fix issues with weird configurations on the spot! Oh, you build with AR_FLAGS=cruT and something doesn’t like it? OK, we fix it so that the jhbuild modules are not affected by that variable. Oh, turns out we missed a dependency, no problem, we add it to the modules file or install them on the bots, and then document the dependency. I set up a very clean chroot which we could use for trying out changes so as to not disrupt the tree too much for the other hackfest participants, and I think overall we did good.

The aftermath

By the time we were done our colleagues who ran other distributions such as Fedora were already being able to get a substantial improvements to the number of tests passing, and so did we! Also, the ability to seamlessly upgrade all the bots with a simple commit made it possible for us to very easily land a change that required a very recent (as in unreleased) version of soup which made our networking backend way simpler. All that red looks great, doesn’t it? And we aren’t done yet, we’ll certainly be making more tweaks to this infrastructure to make it more transparent and more helpful to the users (contributors and other people interested in running the tests).

If you’ve been hit by the instability we caused, sorry about that, poke mrobinson or myself in the #webkitgtk+ IRC channel on FreeNode, and we’ll help you out or fix any issues. If you haven’t, we hope you enjoy all the goodness that a reproducible testing suite has to offer! That’s it for now, folks, I’ll have more to report on follow-up work started at the hackfest soon enough, hopefully =).

Reverse flexible rows and columns, Socket API and Panels

2011-12-05T23:34:13+00:00

Following the relatively low count of 1,097 changes two weeks ago, last week introduced a combined total of 1,945 changes, 1,186 at Chromium and 759 at WebKit. While many of these changes were part of the rush for features to make it into Google Chrome 17 (which will be branched tomorrow), highlights include two important new features for the Flexbox implementation and a Socket API.

A few updates have been made to Chromium’s extension APIs, namely that the MHTML and webRequest APIs have been moved out of the experimental namespace, and a checkpoint commit for a new Socket API. While it’s not functional yet, it will eventually allow for extensions such as SSH and IRC clients to be made.

The visual appearance of Panels has been worked on quite a lot last week, with a visual refresh landing on Chromium for Mac OS X, together with a three-stage minimize animation. For Windows, the UI has been updated as well, and Panels can now also be drawn in iconified mode.

As for specification support, WebKit’s implementation of the bdo, bdi and output elements is now mostly aligned with the HTML5 specification. Limited parsing for the grid-columns and grid-rows properties has been implemented, CSS Filters will now render correctly on transformed elements and CSS Flexbox has been taught about reverse rows and columns. Images’ sources can be overwritten using the CSS content property now, and the correct focus rings for areas defined in an image’s image map will now be shown for zoomed pages.

The getMatchedCSSRules() method now knows how to handle pseudo-elements, SVG Gaussian blurs in a single dimension have been corrected, dragging the mouse out of :active elements will make it lose :hover as well and both range sliders and spin buttons have been fixed for usage in multiple columns.

To name a few improvements in accessibility support: multi-line selects on Windows will now expose the right states, tabs, menu and list items will receive mouse events and non-focusable nodes will no longer report to be focusable.

Other changes which occurred last week:

More static initializers have been removed from the Chromium source.
Chromium will now identify itself as another browser for two specific sites using Silverlight due to UA sniffing.
Intel landed an SSE optimization for two math functions used for Web Audio API, doubling their performance.
Chromium’s compositor is now able to use scissor-rect optimizations.
Usage of “JavaScript” versus “Javascript” has been made consistent throughout Chromium.
IndexedDB cursors will now be pre-fetched, yielding up two 2x performance improvement.
The determination of whether HTTP pipelining is supported for a certain host has been made more careful.
Apple’s JavaScriptCore can now JIT integral arrays, and now features optimized string equality checks.
WebKit’s WebIDL’s implementation has been taught about static methods.
Style sharing has been optimized by Antti Koivisto; 20% less style memory and +25% matching performance.
Apple seems to be working on bringing Web Notification support to Safari.
Alejandro G. Castro is now a WebKit reviewer, congratulations!
A patch by Mark Pilgrim appears.

This week I expect Chromium to reach version 18, lots of additional BlackBerry upstreaming and more work on scoped stylesheets. That’ll be all again!

Accelerated Compositing in webkit-clutter

2011-11-29T17:55:03+00:00

For a while now my fellow Collaboran Joone Hur has been working on implementing the Accelerated Compositing infrastructure available in WebKit in webkit-clutter, so that we can use Clutter’s powers for compositing separate layers and perform animations. This work is being done by Collabora and is sponsored by BOSCH, whom I’d like to thank! What does all this mean, you ask? Let me tell me a bit about it.

The way animations usually work in WebKit is by repainting parts of the page every few milliseconds. What that means in technical terms is that an area of the page gets invalidated, and since the whole page is one big image, all of the pieces that are in that part of the page have to be repainted: the background, any divs, images, text that are at that part of the page.

What the accelerated compositing code paths allow is the creation of separate pieces to represent some of the layers, allowing the composition to happen on the GPU, removing the need to perform lots of cairo paint operations per second in many cases. So if we have a semi-transparent video moving around the page, we can have that video be a separate texture that is layered on top of the page, made transparent and animated by the GPU. In webkit-clutter’s case this is done by having separate actors for each of the layers.

I have been looking at this code on and off, and recently joined Joone in the implementation of some of the pieces. The accelerated compositing infrastructure was originally built by Apple and is, for that reason, works in a way that is very similar to Core Animation. The code is still a bit over the place as we work on figuring out how to best translate the concepts into clutter concepts and there are several bugs, but some cool demos are already possible! Bellow you have one of the CSS3 demos that were made by Apple to demo this new functionality running on our MxLauncher test browser.

You can also see that the non-Accelerated version is unable to represent the 3D space correctly. Also, can you guess which of the two MxLauncher instances is spending less CPU? In this second video I show the debug borders being painted around the actors that were created to represent layers.

The code, should you like to peek or test is available in the ac2 branch of our webkit-clutter repository: http://gitorious.org/webkit-clutter/webkit-clutter/commits/ac2

We still have plenty of work to do, so expect to hear more about it. During our annual hackfest in A Coruña we plan to discuss how this work could be integrated also in the WebKitGTK+ port, perhaps by taking advantage of clutter-gtk, which would benefit both ports, by sharing code and maintenance, and providing this great functionality to Epiphany users. Stay tuned!

GamePad API, revision 10,000 and WebGL for WebKitGTK

2011-11-28T17:29:19+00:00

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.

Cross Fading, CSS Flexible Box, Grid Layout, Filters and Meta Referrer

2011-11-21T17:55:07+00:00

Last week was the busiest week so far for both projects, totaling up to 1,745 changes — 794 for WebKit, and 951 for Chromium. Highlights include CSS Cross Fading, Flexible Box, Filters and <meta name=referrer>.

Within Chromium, the new History UI has been launched and can be seen on chrome://history. Content Security Policy will be enabled for all extensions using a (newly introduced) manifest version of two or higher and improved download protection has now been enabled by default, assuming you have Safe Browsing enabled.

Right clicking on function values in Web Inspector will now give you the ability to browse to it’s definition. The font property in the styles pane will now show up as a proper shorthand property, selected items in context menus have been given a slight gradient and messages from the front-end to the back-end are now asynchronous.

Timothy Horton landed support for the CSS4 Images cross-fade() function. Though not fully implemented yet, it can be used as a value for any property that expects an image, such as background-image, and will render a cross faded combination of the two given images or gradients. Examples working in nightlies can be found here.

The new CSS3 Flexible Box implementation in WebKit has been enabled by default. While new features and enhancements are still incoming, it is a lot more performant and aligns WebKit better with the spec. Ojan, Tony and Julien have started working on implementing CSS Grid Layout, some patches for which have already landed.

Another new feature which landed today is support for <meta name=”referrer”>. By specifying the referrer policy in the content attribute, which can be one of never (don’t include a referrer header on navigation), always (which includes cross-protocol requests), origin (just send the page’s origin) and default, you can anonymize any request.

As for improved specification support, another CSS 2.1 test was fixed last week. The document.width and document.height properties have been removed, as has the initProgressEvent method, and access keys now work on all elements. JavaScriptCore’s implementation of Error.prototype.toString is now ES5 conformant, adding invalid track formats will throw an exception and the report-only mode for Content Security Policy has been fixed.

Most CSS Filters now work in WebKit nightlies, which includes grayscale, serpia, invert, hue rotating, saturating, opacity, gamma, drop shadow and blurring effects. Meanwhile, computed styles for CSS Shaders have been implemented as well. For CSS Exclusions, the wrap-margin, wrap-padding, wrap-flow and wrap-through properties are now being parsed, indicating good progress.

Other changes which occurred last week:

A low-latency audio channel has been implemented in Chrome for Windows, based on the WASAPI.
The WebKit Build bot previously used to test Flexible Box will now be testing the CSS Grid Layout progress.
Infrastructure for the BlackBerry WebKit build system is being upstreamed to the project.
Pages should no longer flash when switching to GPU Accelerated rendering, for example due to transitions.
An experimental WebGL extension has been implemented adding support for compressed textures.
Two more performance improvements for the DFG JIT: 1% due to improved speculation, and 1% due to calls.
Eight bit strings have been enabled for WTF’s StringImpl and JavaScriptCore.
Tab changes in Chromium for Linux are now about 15 millisecond faster.
Client-level Chrome installs can now update themselves even if a system-level Chrome has been installed.
Stack Exchange is now listed in all of Chrome’s Extension Documentation as a support channel.
Machine names will now also be listed on the about:sessions page for Tab Synchronization.
Color-filter optimizations have been enabled in Skia, delivering significant speedups for sites using shadows.
Exceptions for permissions given to the Full Screen API can now be managed through Chromium’s options.
The Bookmark All Tabs dialog has been re-implemented using WebUI.
Thanks to Nico Weber, another 59 static initializers and 116 exit-time destructors have been removed.
Through 16 commits similar to this one, Avi Drissman has been adding OVERRIDE keywords.
The new experimental Speech Input API was announced, including an example.

Work to keep an eye out for this week are related to

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