Toggling bold, italic, etc in webkit browsers

I know this issue has been brought up a few times before, but I'm hoping someone will take another look at it:

Basically when in a webkit browser, the user is unable to "toggle" Bold, Italic, Underline or change fonts, colors, etc without highlighting the text first.

After a little research I did notice there was a bug report on this:
http://dev.fckeditor.net/ticket/1272
which basically says "not our problem, webkit devs need to fix".
(see:https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15256)

Now, in my mind... 3 years without fixing means it probably wont be fixed by the webkit devs anytime soon.

I was going to put it to rest as a necessary evil, but I noticed that TinyMCE had somehow found a way to enable toggling / changing without selections. I'm not sure how they do it, but it should be noted that it is possible to do. Possibly something new was added recently to webkit that enables a workaround?

I don't know how complicated this would be, but just of the top of my head, if the selector is the issue, couldn't it just have javascript just track what buttons are enabled / disabled? IE: click "bold" JS notes that bold is enabled, but doesn't add <b> tag, upon typing first letter, <b> tag is added with content inside.

Any chance on this getting revisited / does anyone know how they might have accomplished this?

On the other side of things... I don't understand why it's not able to be turned off on the fly
Example:
If you type some text, highlight and select bold (it bolds) and keep typing, the text you are typing is now bold. If you go and click the "bold" button again, it doesn't do anything (stays toggled on). Is the selector issue above causing this somehow? or is that something else entirely.