Last week in WebKit:
making waves

WebKit has been quieter than usual since Andreas posted last week. This may have had something to do with all the Apple engineers being at WWDC :).

Although there were not as many commits as usual, some big things happened and many great new features are now public.

A better Inspector

In case you missed that: a great event this week was the improved Web Inspector making its way to WebKit.

Previously, the new inspector was only available in Safari, while the WebKit project was still using the older version started in 2006.

Since Tuesday, the updated inspector has been open-sourced and is available directly in WebKit. If you want to add a feature, you can submit patches directly on bugs.webkit.org for the component Web Inspector.

Tim blogged about the improved inspector. You can already use it on the WebKit Nightlies, or on OS X Mavericks.

Runtime improvements

• Ruth Fong added supportsContext() to <canvas>.
  The method supportsContext() allows web pages to do feature detection on the drawing model supported by <canvas>. For example, you can call canvas.supportsContext('experimental-webgl') to find if WebGL is enabled without creating a temporary context object.
• Daniel Bates changed the way window.find() handles a search query with diacritical characters.
  I love this change. Previously, in a case insensitive search, a search for “café” would match “cafe” and “café”. Now, it will not generalize “é” to “e”, and only “café” would match the search.
• Chris Fleizach improved MathML’s line fraction rendering and fixed its accessibility.

Engine

• Brent Fulgham updated Windows to use new-run-webkit-test. This simplifies the testing infrastructure.
• Christophe Dumez is still working hard on modernizing IDLs and improving the bindings. This week he added support for the types byte and octet, removed useless checks in the bindings, added support for the latest Web IDL indexed property getters, and did some cleaning of IDLs.
• Simon Fraser fixed a bug that would prevent some pages from using WebKit fast scrolling, and some nasty bugs with fixed background painting.
• Robert Hogan fixed bugs on table rendering, on replaced elements that aren’t RenderReplaced object, and on the line breaking of lines with nowrap and trailing spaces.

The WebKittens of the week are Antoine Quint, Joseph Pecoraro and Timothy Hatcher for refusing the status quo on tooling and making the Web Inspector awesome.