Google Chrome 17 Adds Revamped Panels, Thousands of Other Changes and Fixes

It's been another busy week for Chrome/Chromium developers and Google's Peter Beverloo has been keeping an eye on things to tell us all about it. He counts 1,945 changes made to Chromium and WebKit in the last week alone, 1,186 for Chromium, the rest for WebKit.

A lot of the changes focus on the technical aspects, but there are some interesting things in there for regular users as well.

The Panels feature has gotten a few updates. Panels are small windows that are designed to house app components, things like a chat window, a music player playlist and so on.

On Mac OS X, the look of the panel windows has been completely reworked, the changes are available in Chromium for now. There is also a new three-stage minimize animation. The look of the panels has been updated on Windows too.

Under the hood, Chrome extensions are getting support for MHTML and webRequests as the related APIs are no longer marked as experimental.

Thanks to some updates in WebKit, Chrome/Chromium now mostly supports the bdo tag - which specifies text direction, for example right-to-left, the bdi tag - which isolates a portion of text from the direction of the outside text, and the output tag which represents the result of a calculation.

Of the more trivial but notable changes, "JavaScript" is now used exclusively in Chrome as opposed to the also used but incorrect "Javascript." Google also made some changes to go around bugs in Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo Japan incorrectly identified Google Chrome and determined that it does not support Silverlight. Chrome will spoof its user agent, identifying itself as Safari on Mac and Firefox on Windows, for these pages, until they are fixed.

Google Chrome 17 has been in the works for a month now and Google is getting ready to move it downstream.