Regular listeners to the NeowinCAST podcasts will know I get more than a little passionate about web development, and a surprise announcement by Opera today at having scored 100/100 in the Acid3 test has caused more than a few heads to turn.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project designed to check the compliance of a web browser to various DOM and javascript standards. Different browser manufacturers place varying amounts of importance on passing the tests in their nightly builds, but today Opera announced they have passed the full compliment of tests for the first time.
Previously the race had been expected to be won by WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari with a current score of 98%; on the Surfin' Safari blog, daily updates of the edge towards passing each test had been given much to the anticipation of web developers.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project designed to check the compliance of a web browser to various DOM and javascript standards. Different browser manufacturers place varying amounts of importance on passing the tests in their nightly builds, but today Opera announced they have passed the full compliment of tests for the first time.
Previously the race had been expected to be won by WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari with a current score of 98%; on the Surfin' Safari blog, daily updates of the edge towards passing each test had been given much to the anticipation of web developers.
It should be noted, however, that Opera's announcement has not been verified by the wider community as their preview build is not available for testing. Conversely, nightly builds of WebKit are freely downloadable for developers to test at their leisure.
Nightly builds of Firefox currently score 71%, while Internet Explorer 8 beta trails behind with 18% compliance.
View: Surfin' Safari blog for WebKit updates View: Announcement from Opera View: Regularly updated listings of Acid3 browser compliance View: Neowin Forum discussion
Its still going, most of the fighting is done by cult-like enthusiasts. You seen the sad browser support videos on YouTube, t-shirts, wallpapers, etc...
Its still going, most of the fighting is done by cult-like enthusiasts. You seen the sad browser support videos on YouTube, t-shirts, wallpapers, etc...
I was talking about the tread. :-P
I wonder! Opera can't open an simple Ajax* page correctly. but it won ACID3 test where IE fails.
EX: Gmail, Windows Live Mail etc
The only people who care are the people who own the browsers. Only two letters matter to them: P-R (Press Release).
It's not released right now so does it have meaning?
"Not trying" is meaningless. Putting out the effort has great meaning. Perhaps not practical until released to the public, but please don't dismiss their efforts in their entirety.
*disclaimer: I am not an Opera user. Nor am I entirely convinced that ACID testing is the most accurate way to tell the best browser. It is just a single benchmarking tool.
It's not released right now so does it have meaning?
Sorry, double negation, until its released its meaningless.
1.- Because the number indicator can display 100 despite other rendering errors.
2.- That could as well be the reference page.
As a whole we cant determine the results properly without a public build, even many members at the opera forums said that the real challenge is: "Who will release a public version: Opera or Webkit?"
"Not trying" is meaningless. Putting out the effort has great meaning. Perhaps not practical until released to the public, but please don't dismiss their efforts in their entirety.
*disclaimer: I am not an Opera user. Nor am I entirely convinced that ACID testing is the most accurate way to tell the best browser. It is just a single benchmarking tool.
Im not dismissing their efforts mark, I just say that we need something more concrete than a screenshot.
"Not trying" is meaningless. Putting out the effort has great meaning. Perhaps not practical until released to the public, but please don't dismiss their efforts in their entirety.
*disclaimer: I am not an Opera user. Nor am I entirely convinced that ACID testing is the most accurate way to tell the best browser. It is just a single benchmarking tool.
Im not dismissing their efforts mark, I just say that we need something more concrete than a screenshot.
Seriously dude... those are Opera's developers posting that not some leaked opera build on some chinese website
"Not trying" is meaningless. Putting out the effort has great meaning. Perhaps not practical until released to the public, but please don't dismiss their efforts in their entirety.
*disclaimer: I am not an Opera user. Nor am I entirely convinced that ACID testing is the most accurate way to tell the best browser. It is just a single benchmarking tool.
Im not dismissing their efforts mark, I just say that we need something more concrete than a screenshot.
Seriously dude... those are Opera's developers posting that not some leaked opera build on some chinese website
So, you believe everything you read I suppose.
Well, that works for you I guess.
Believe me, when I see a public build I will be the first to congratulate them.
"Not trying" is meaningless. Putting out the effort has great meaning. Perhaps not practical until released to the public, but please don't dismiss their efforts in their entirety.
*disclaimer: I am not an Opera user. Nor am I entirely convinced that ACID testing is the most accurate way to tell the best browser. It is just a single benchmarking tool.
Im not dismissing their efforts mark, I just say that we need something more concrete than a screenshot.
Seriously dude... those are Opera's developers posting that not some leaked opera build on some chinese website
So, you believe everything you read I suppose.
Well, that works for you I guess.
Believe me, when I see a public build I will be the first to congratulate them.
Now you're just being argumentative. Saying that because he believes what the Opera developers say about their own program and saying he would believe everything he reads is just a ludicrous comparison.
Now come on Mozilla, get your arses in gear!
So, what sense does it make if it passes that freaking test, but fails at basics ?
winning acid3 doesnt meant a whole lot
Perhaps the pages are faulty and Firefox is merely more tolerant of bad code than Opera?
Got any examples?
Perhaps the pages are faulty and Firefox is merely more tolerant of bad code than Opera?
Got any examples?
considering the fully released version of firefox (v2) doesn't even pass the acid2 test, i'd go with the opera renderings over the firefox ones
nothing to really worry about.
/waits for a web developer to destroy ThaCrip's comment.
Congrats to the Opera team. I'm liking the 9.5 beta.
nothing to really worry about.
So you are saying that some memory management with some systems its more important than stablishing a standard for the web?
Granted I'm not running the latest nightly build of Opera, that doesn't change the fact that I still won't have to write workarounds for compatibility.
The problem turned out that Opera messes up it's internal width values for liquid columns (in a table) when a class is added via Javascript and it takes up extra space that wasn't assigned to the column that the class was added onto.
IE 7 doesn't support XHTML 1.1 well since it doesn't support the proper MIME type without using hacks. On IE, web servers normally have to be configured to send the XHTML page as HTML for IE to not try to render the whole page as a raw text document, and then you could just as well be using HTML 4.01 because you'd be violating the spec in this case. That's why using XHTML is considered harmful and to follow the specs without restorting to hacks, people would probably normally have to stick with HTML 4.01.
Here's more info on this subject:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq
XHTML 1.1 is pure XML, and only intended to be XML. It cannot reliably be sent to legacy browsers. Therefore XHTML 1.1 documents must be sent with an XML-related media type, such as application/xhtml+xml.
No. However, there is a trick that allows you to serve XHTML1.0 documents to Internet Explorer as application/xml.
Last edited by Jugalator on 27 Mar 2008 - 10:02
IE 7 doesn't support XHTML 1.1 well since it doesn't support the proper MIME type without using hacks. On IE, web servers normally have to be configured to send the XHTML page as HTML for IE to not try to render the whole page as a raw text document, and then you could just as well be using HTML 4.01 because you'd be violating the spec in this case. That's why using XHTML is considered harmful and to follow the specs without restorting to hacks, people would probably normally have to stick with HTML 4.01.
Here's more info on this subject:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq
XHTML 1.1 is pure XML, and only intended to be XML. It cannot reliably be sent to legacy browsers. Therefore XHTML 1.1 documents must be sent with an XML-related media type, such as application/xhtml+xml.
No. However, there is a trick that allows you to serve XHTML1.0 documents to Internet Explorer as application/xml.
My mistake. It is XHTML 1.0 Transitional which I do believe works fine with IE 7.
Either way, my point still stands.
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1206578003&count=1
There you have it, acid3 is a sham, explains how webkit scores so high... Apple people finding bugs in the test... what a joke!
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1206578003&count=1
There you have it, acid3 is a sham, explains how webkit scores so high... Apple people finding bugs in the test... what a joke!
+1
So yes, WebKit won. Opera almost won, but the tests were wrong.
It took forever to get most browsers to render acid 2 let alone 3... so acid 3 honestly doesn't impress me as much.
I agree ACID is pretty good. But it seems to be a marketing scheme by browsers now a days, which still are riddled with other issues that affect us developers just as much
but, nonetheless, this acid tests will help developers get the standards right more quickly and we all can benefit.
It's the first publicly-available browser to get 100% in the test. I don't think Opera won this round.
Edit: Scratch that, after emptying the cache and reloading, it gets 100%.
For what good it may do, Safari is hardly a Windows browser. It's a MacOS app in look and feel clumsily dropped in the middle of Windows. It reminds me of the old X11 days, before GTK+ and similar popular toolkits, where every application looked completely different. Although, at least, the font rendering was the same across apps (aside from a few doozies like TeXmacs, which did it differently for a reason)
Luckily, there is a sub-port in the works that replaces the closed source stuff with open source stuff (Cairo instead of CoreGraphics and cURL instead of the networking stuff)
Cairo is LGPL (like WebKit) and cURL is MIT, So there shouldn't be any problems with using them in closed source apps.
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.
So it only took them a few hours after the bug in the test was fixed for them to finally get 100/100, and then 5 hours after that released a pixel-perfect version.
So 8 hours after the final test has been rectified.... that is very fast. Opera haven't even released thier passing browser to proove that it is in fact pixel perfect. I think Webkit won. May even be a draw if Opera proove that they did it.
note: I am running Windows XP but that shouldn't be a problem.
The lastest compiled Windows version is r31368, while Mac and source version is r31370 (this one scores 100/100)
A 100% pass doesn't have to mean everything is there, I believe there's a color animation that has to be "smooth" for example, which doesn't show up in a screenshot, for one thing.
But both the Opera and Safari teams have made excellent jobs here!
If I were to pick today, it'd have to be 1) Firefox 3, 2) Opera 9.5, 3) Safari 3.1. Firefox at my first spot because of great extensions and the excellent memory usage and speed nowadays. Its customization AND performance is hard to beat. Additionally, Acid3 is not yet a major downside as websites won't be designed for this until IE supports the standards well, which won't even come in IE 8. That browser will do Acid2, which Firefox 3 also does.
Opera coming second for everything you get out of the box in a leaner install than Firefox's without extensions, and also being very fast and with great memory usage. Safari coming last because of its speed that also seem to rival the best, but consuming way too much memory on Windows at least to be comfortable after long sessions, and lacking even Opera's integrated adblocking support, as well as failing Windows UI guidelines miserably. :-( Yes, I know it's branding, but that doesn't make it less of a problem in some areas.
Last edited by Jugalator on 27 Mar 2008 - 09:48
The Acid tests are an artificial test. They mean nothing. What counts is can your browser display the pages that you want it to display? Nothing else matters.
(FF and IE user)
You know, that allows browsers to render pages properly.
Here's the thing: If it displays the page properly (and I have yet to see any page in IE not display properly, all but one in FireFox displays correctly) then who cares???
not sure why but it crash all the time...
Vista Ultimate Sp1 Final
Opera 9.26
Webkit > *
Goodnight!
I belive that they got thatscore using 9.5 version of opera...
Opera compiled for ACID3 test - publicly avaliable.
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