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IE 5.5 Beats IE6 and IE7 On Acid 3
Posted by
kdawson
on Sunday March 09, @10:24PM
from the acid-reflux dept.
from the acid-reflux dept.
Steven Noonan sends us to a page where he is collecting and updating results for various browsers on the newly released Acid 3 test. No browser yet scores 100 on this test. (We discussed Acid 3 when it came out.) He writes, "It's not surprising that Internet Explorer is losing to every other modern browser, but how did IE 5.5 beat IE 6.0 and 7.0?" All of the IE versions score below 20 on Acid 3.
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IT: Acid3 Test Released 309 comments
An anonymous reader writes ""The Web Standards Project has announced the release of Acid3, the latest test designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in browsers. 'By making sure their software adheres to the test, the creators of these products can be more confident that their software will display and function with Web pages correctly both now and with Web pages of the future. The Acid3 Test is designed to test specifications for Web 2.0, and exposes potential flaws in implementations of the public ECMAScript 262 and W3C Document Object Model 2 standards.' Screenshots at the Drunken Fist site show the success of Safari 3 (which originally scored 31, but is now Scoring 87/100) IE6, and IE7 (massive fail, of course)'." There are additional discussions of the new test happening around the web.
Firehose:Internet Explorer 5.5 beats IE6 and IE7 in Acid 3 by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Read that too fast... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes it seem more like a suggestion...
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing intent with result.
The difference is that the teams working on Safari, Opera, Firefox, et al want to improve their product. Microsoft didn't care for a very long time. In fact, the Safari team even have a bug filed for the rendering issues Safari has with Acid3 [webkit.org]. Further, they're communicating frequently with their user base and anyone else interested with regard to their progress [webkit.org].
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, what good is a recommendation, you ask? Plenty - mostly interoperability. The W3C provides a specification and recommends people implement it. Those that do can interoprate. The consumer wins.
How do you get the vendors to implement the RECs? Make it an important bullet point on their feature lists. The Acid tests are a particularly well done kick in the backside for browser vendors. They have effectively become more important than the bullet point that says "standards compliant" because they are a (limited) test suite. For vendors to be able to say they do well in the tests, certain key parts of the RECs must be implemented and done so correctly, there is no room for buggy or partial implementation.
The result in the end is better interoperability. The RECs provide that common basis that vendors can't quibble over. The Acid tests are both the carrot to get them implementing the RECs and proof that they did so (partially) correctly.
/Mike
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
I just find it very amusing. We have 'standard' that no one really follows. When the best score is a 90% from a browser that probably is the lest supported in terms of actual web sites, and the next couple that come it are at 70% or so. That is like a C- with no curve. Not exactly worthy of bragging...
It just makes me wonder what all the fuss is about.
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really true. Browser vendors participate in the W3C working groups that publish these specifications. They have an active role in creating them. Take a look at the acknowledgment section of the CSS 2 specification [w3.org], for example.
And of course, one of the four editors of the specification is Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera.
So you see, far from the poor old browser vendors not having the resources to make anything better and passively reacting to anything the W3C says, you can see that the browser vendors are substantially the people who made the specifications.
Summary answers its own question (Score:5, Funny)
Brett
Old Web Browser Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old Web Browser Standards (Score:5, Funny)
safari (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
Re:safari (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox. But if you look at the latest development builds, Safari does far better than Opera and Firefox. Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
Maybe this is obvious but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe this is obvious but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Informative)
It even has your same link right in the summary...
Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Funny)
Three months later (Score:5, Funny)
We regret to hear of the shortcoming you found in ACID 3 Test Home Basic. We have not forgotten our advertised promise to pass the test. On that note, we are proud to introduce the ACID 3 Test Pro! IE8 happily passes this version of ACID 3, which is comprised of VBScript, ActiveX, and Silverlight technologies.
Yours Truly,
Department of Extending Standards and Compatibilities
Microsoft
Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Informative)
It is a problem, but it's not the hard-coding people seem to think it is. The problem is not that Internet Explorer 8 is checking for www.webstandards.org, the problem is that the mirrors that are failing are changing the test in a way that is important to Internet Explorer. Part of the test refers to a page that intentionally doesn't exist in order to check a fallback option. The trouble is that this page is referred to with an absolute URL, which means that when you simply copy the test to another host, it becomes a cross-domain issue.
Ian's pointing out that it's still a failure so it should be subject to the same fallback, which is correct, but the important point is that it's failing to load in a different way to how it would on the www.webstandards.org host because the mirrors didn't take the cross-domain issue into account. I expect the final version of Internet Explorer 8 to correct this problem, but it's not at all a case of Microsoft attempting to "cheat", just an unfortunate coincidence.
Yes, you don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the browsers are getting to that 100% point. Acid2 was not built to check 100% compliance, at that would have been useless. Not that the main browsers are reaching 100%, Acid2 is becoming useless, and Acid3 is necessary to see who has the best compliance. To use your school analogy, consider Acid2 to be the second grade. It is important to achieve that level, but when you do, you can expect the 3rd grade to follow it.
(And if your opinion of public schools is as low as mine, you are welcome to substitute "second grade" with level of knowledge that a 7 year old should have.
Re:Very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
This might fit in well with Slashdot groupthink, but it doesn't fit in well with reality.
Back when Internet Explorer 6 was being developed, they were in direct competition with Netscape. Internet Explorer 6, when it was released was probably the best browser around when it came to supporting CSS. And you want us to believe that the explanation for 6 being worse than 5.5 in this test was deliberate sabotage by Microsoft?
They abandoned Internet Explorer development when they won the browser war. Sure, at that point you can make a case for them not wanting to be compatible. But at that point, they weren't developing Internet Explorer at all, so you can't use it as an explanation for Internet Explorer getting worse. And when Internet Explorer development was restarted, they were responding to a call for improved standards support,which they have delivered on.
I'm sorry, but deliberate sabotage is a ridiculous way of explaining this. Remember, the Acid tests are designed to trigger flaws in popular browsers. Of course it's going to target Internet Explorer 6 and 7 bugs over ancient versions. Internet Explorer 5.5 is no longer popular, so what's the point in ferreting out bugs for the Acid3 test? The real surprise is that people didn't expect this result.
Re:Celik Strikes Back (Score:5, Informative)
No, it wasn't. Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows uses the Trident rendering engine. Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac uses the Tasman rendering engine. They are totally different codebases.
Actually, in most ways, Internet Explorer 6 has better standards support than Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac.
Re:Simple answers for simple questions (Score:5, Informative)