With 611 commits to the Chromium repository last week, and 449 commits to the WebKit one, my guess is that last week was the last week this year with more than a thousand changes. Highlights include support for the text-emphasis property and Web Inspector’s style editing panes, which now support Firebug-like editing.

Good news for fans of Firebug: editing CSS properties in Web Inspector will now be done with separate fields for the property’s name and value. Using the arrow keys to increment or decrement a numeric value will cause immediate changes again. Furthermore, some more work was done on the Extension API. Specifically, support was added for adding and overriding HTTP request headers.

As for specification related changes, the endedPlayback property for HTML5 media elements won’t return true anymore if the media file couldn’t be loaded. The -webkit-appearance property no longer accepts the value caps-lock-indicator and the delete method for IndexedDB Cursors has been added.

Work on two text-related CSS properties has continued as well. Firstly, Dan Bernstein has been working on the text-emphasis property, the final part of which landed last Friday. This property allows you to include small symbols next to the text, which Eastern Asian documents may use to emphasize the run of the text. Takumi Takano updated the values for text-combine to match the current CSS proposal.

Other changes last week include:

Kenneth Russell ported the Web Audio API’s FFTFrame implementation to MKL.

Stylesheets defined under the “ print ” media will now be downloaded with a lowered priority.

” media will now be downloaded with a lowered priority. Chromium OS now also reports to accept the language “en”, following the Chromium browser.

Chrome Frame will now ignore IE’s conditional comment tags when parsing a HTML stream.

The --enable-page-prerender flag will now imply content prefetching as well.

Hyphens are now allowed in the domain names of e-mail addresses for the Chrome OS users UI.

The GTK WebKit port implemented two new accessibility roles: STATE_FOCUSED and STATE_FOCUSABLE.

Inline flow layers are now able to paint floating descendants.

Hooray! Inset box shadows will now render properly within Chromium.

No access will be given anymore in Safari to existing databases in private browsing.

The usual bits of work on the DOM UI / Web UI pages.

WebKit2 is now capable of displaying an IME on Windows.

The Qt port has implemented the File Reader API specification.

More fine-tuning has been done for the Web Timing implementation.

Since the next article will take another seven days: Merry Christmas! I’m going to spend my time with family, so expect next week’s post to be rather short. However, I probably won’t be the only one. Enjoy!