Last week in WebKit:
Threaded HTML parser and background blending

Feb 14, 2013

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This update describes the 696 commits made to WebKit last week, up to revision 142428.

It’s now possible to change the dock side of Web Inspector by dragging its toolbar. There’s now an option to show composited layer borders and the JavaScript tokenizer can now detect round braces. Also recently introduced is the Continuous Painting Mode and the possible upcoming addition of a console.table() function.

Adam, Eric and Tony have been working on changing WebKit’s HTML parser to handle tokenization and parts of parsing on a background thread. On resource constrained systems, such as the Nexus 7 tablet, this yields improvements of at least 10%, with the maximum stop time going down by roughly 50%. Some of last week’s fixes focused on the preload scanner, timing of the load event and the XSS auditor.

WebKit’s Media Stream implementation has been enhanced with support for DTMF. Mike will be working on support for X-Content-Type-Options:nosniff and edit actions have been added for Bold and Italic commands. document.activeElement won’t return non-focusable elements anymore, the formenctype attribute now defaults to an empty string and FocusEvent got a constructor.

Rik started working on implementing support for the background-blend-mode CSS property to WebKit, which determines the blending mode of the background image. The vmax unit has been implemented, completing the vh, vw, vmin and vmax group, and language selection for the ::cue pseudo-element is now available. Grids now recompute their logical height after row or column changes, and WebKit can now parse grid-auto-flow.

In a series of just over a dozen commits, Gregg imported a slightly modified Khronos WebGL conformance test suite into WebKit. Sharing test suites is great, and I hope we can see more of this!

Other changes that occurred last week: