Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test

Rytis writes "Opera has just become the second browser after Safari to be able to pass completely the famous ACID2 test. Mark Wilton-Jones is running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID tests. Of course, it includes a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the nice happy face saying "Hello world!"."

ACID passed, real world?

[toomanyhandles]

Great that they pass the ACID test, but the real-world is just not perfect or by-the-book. They need to be able to handle what really happens, too. Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.

Re:ACID passed, real world?

[damn_hippy]

I agree with you on that. It can pass all the certifications it wants, but until Opera supports some of the more basic javscript methods IE and FF have no problem with, it will never be my browser of choice.

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[babbling]

I don't think this should be judged based on how much of an achievement it is. The important part is that the browser passes the ACID2 test. How hard it was for each individual browser to get there is not important.

Who got there first also isn't important, we just need all browsers to get there.

AGREED:ACID passed, real world?

[sreekotay]

Two sides to this: (1) conformance for developers (makes our lives easier) (2) compatibility for consumers (they don't care about making our lives easier)
--
graphicallyspeaking [kotay.com]

Good news

[BertieBaggio]

A big well done to the Opera team. Safari passed the test in November last year, and hopefully Firefox will pass soon as well. Increased standards compliace is a Good Thing(tm) for users and webmasters alike. If the minority browsers continue to push standards (which the tech-savvy webmasters follow) it will push IE into improving its own rendering engine. Although even their unreleased version seems to be a bit behind the times...

From TFA: It is somewhat worrying that IE 6 renders Acid 2 very similarly to Opera 3.6, and the hyped IE 7 renders it very similarly to Opera 4.

'Somewhat worrying' indeed. I know people (of the pretty-damn-computer-literate variety) that won't switch from IE6 because it "works fine for them". I'm sure they know about the vulnerabilities [now that Symantec says so, it must be official!], the rendering issues and speed*, but they are sticking to their guns. So the only way people like this will have their experience enhanced is by teams like Mozilla and Opera pushing the browser envelope and hoping IE take interest. Either that or some X factor that makes the alternative browser a 'killer app', rather than IE, which is an app killer. (I couldn't resist, sorry!)

Well done again to Opera. Webmasters everywhere are silently saying a big 'thank you'.

*Note: I am aware that some will say that IE 6 loads quicker/renders quicker than FF. I have found the two of comparable speed for light pages, and FF slightly faster for 'heavier' pages. Opera is faster than both of them. Draw your own conclusions, and install all three (or two if your run a non-Windows OS). I found an old demo disc with IE 3 recently, and will be trying that out.

I like how...

[katterjohn]

... they show IE screenshots, but don't show how close/far away Netscape and Mozilla and Firefox are from passing.

Re:Cool

[Uber Banker]

Firefox is good. The plugins extend the browser hugely.

But I'm happy with Opera, be it for the faster responce I get on the same machine as I have Firefox installed on, the ability not to search for plug ins for whatever feature I need, 'it just works'

I just find Opera is faster at implementing standards, is more reliable with IE geared sites (don't like the fact, but I have to be pragmatic and deal with it as promoting interoperability is not what pays my bills), is more innovative (has important new features first and has them 'out of the box') and makes a good testing ground for my projects, and is all together very nice. And now it's free (as in beer).

Firefox is good. Opera is good too. Different priorities for different users, I don't have access to source code or the ability to contribute in the same way, but for me I'm fine with that. Both are far superior to IE's features, security and map for an interoperable internet in the future. Nuff said.

who was first after safari?

[gEvil (beta)]

Opera has just become the second browser after Safari...

Second browser after Safari? Which was the first after Safari to do it? Oh, you mean the second browser, after Safari...It's amazing what commas can do. Learn to use them.

Re:ACID passed, real world?

[Bogtha]

Safari's DOM API is very incomplete. Probably only about 60-70% of what Firefox implements. Oprah's worse, maybe only 30-40%

I haven't found that. Firefox is ahead on some things and behind on others. For example, Safari supports DOM 2 mutation events, but Firefox doesn't.

As Internet Explorer has shown, having a solid JS DOM is much more important than supporting every CSS corner case.

You're joking, right? Internet Explorer's DOM support is prone to memory leaks and doesn't support basic things like event handling. I'd rephrase your statement as:

"As Internet Explorer has shown, having the largest market share is much more important than supporting most of the CSS or DOM specifications, because that way the web developers work for you, not the other way around."

I think that a lot of people have blind spots, where they are completely unaware of many parts of the specifications, because they don't work in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[oglueck]

This is a bug tracking tool and not a news site. People need this to get their work done. We don't want this slashdotted for a reason.

WebKit matters, not the Safari frontend

[tepples]

In a discussion about the Acid2 test, you claim that Safari isn't free software:

WebKit, the rendering engine Safari uses, is an open source project. Safari itself is very much closed source.

But the frontend code isn't very relevant to this discussion. Safari passes Acid2 if and only if [wikipedia.org] WebKit passes Acid2. Or do you claim that Apple maintains a private WebKit tree with patches that don't get released to the public and that one or more of the private patches is required for WebKit to pass Acid2?

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[Derek Pomery]

Duh.
And anyone who wants to check up on the bug can copy and paste the URL.
There is nothing wrong with that.
The referer block does exactly what it should. Reduce reflexive clicking/tab opening, and making it a conscious descision by folks who want to look at it.

So folks. Don't listen to oglueck here - perfectly alright to visit the link if you have an interest, and even, yes, post *informative* commentary in the bug (such as regressions, related bugs, progress in recent builds, etc)

Re:Ah opera...

[jb.hl.com]

I'll bite. Every browser I've tried, from IE to Konqueror, renders that page fine. Opera doesn't. Are you *sure* it's my fault and not Opera's?

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm all for web standards, but isn't ACID2 a purely academic excercise? It's nice that a browser passes it,
> of course, but in the real world practically nobody is going to be using CSS in that way.

It's not purely academic, it's eminently practical - as the site explains, all of the features are unlikely to be used on the same page, but designers rely on each one of them to work correctly at some point, and have been requesting proper support for years so their pages look consistently good on all browsers.

Re:ACID2: valid test or not?

[vidarh]

The point is that the CSS spec specifies exactly the behavior a browser should use to handle invalid CSS: It should ignore the declaration, but continue to parse the file. A browser that accepts invalid CSS declarations, or fails to recover and continue parsing is not conformant.

So the test is verifying conformance not only with treatment of valid CSS, but also correct treatment of invalid CSS, which is very important given that a significant part of compatibility problems between current web-browsers is caused by different behavior in the face of errors - whether they ignore it, stop parsing, try to render it anyway etc.

Re:Ah opera...

[TrekkieGod]

I've barely been making websites a year, and even I've learned that on the web, markup standards are only a guideline.

Then maybe you should stop making websites, because people like you are the problem.

They're "only a guideline" in that the FBI won't knock on your door if you don't follow the standards. And oh yeah, a lot of browsers will accept your sloppy coding and "render it fine." However, if you want a world where all browsers render all content in the same way, that can't be accomplished by the developing team of any browser. That can only be accomplished by developing and following standards. So, you blame the browser when they don't follow them, and you blame the web developer when he doesn't follow them.

I'm fine with browsers who want to go the extra mile and have non-standard code render correctly, as long as they don't sacrifice proper rendering of the standard code to do it. That doesn't excuse you coding incorrectly, though.

Re:Hit the Nail on the Head

[MooUK]

"If you write a letter in badly broken English, do you expect others to be able to read it and fully comprehend it?"

A lot of people actually DO expect that.

Re:ACID passed, real world?

[BZ]

Firefox supports a large subset of DOM Mutation Events. Not all of them (in part due to the spec being so vague and ill-designed as to not be reasonably implementable), and the support is not bug-free, but there is some support.

ACID2 useless test now

[miro f]

Well done for Opera passing the ACID2 test, although it's no longer a useful test for browser standards adherance. The best test was how versions of each browser released BEFORE the ACID2 test rendered it, so this race for "ACID2 Adherence" is useless. Who passes first isn't important, as they're only fixing a tiny subset of the entire standard. It no longer shows who is more standards compliant.

as an analogy, if you surveyed 100 employees of Google and found they were being paid less than 100 employees of Microsoft, and Google countered by giving those 100 employees a raise, it wouldn't change the original issue. The ACID2 test is simply a "survey" of web standards.

It doesn't work for HTML

[porneL]

1. Explorer is happy to render all crap thrown at it.
2. Webmasters write crap, because it's compatible with crap-rendering browser.
3. Other vendors not only have to implement HTML/CSS/JS, but also all bugs and quirks of Explorer's error (mis)handling to have crap-compiliant browser.
4. No profit.

Re:Why is it so hard to follow standards?

[meringuoid]

And is there an advantage to making a browser that doesn't comply?

Well, there is one possible advantage. Forcing out competition. Suppose there are a number of browsers out there, all complying with an open set of standards. You release your broken browser, which behaves rather oddly and renders things differently. Crucially, however, you bundle it along with another product of yours which already has near 100% marketshare. As a result, your broken browser immediately becomes a major player by default.

What happens then? Everyone's forced to modify their websites to work with your broken browser - and as a result, to work rather oddly, and in some cases not at all, with the standards-compliant browsers. You thereby muscle out the competition and extend your existing monopoly into a new market.

Of course, no company would ever behave so grossly unethically. And if they did, there's no way the government would let them get away with it; the anti-trust lawsuit would surely rip them to shreds. So it's a purely academic concern.

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[badboy_tw2002]

I'm not much of a MS fan myself, but can you really say "paraphrased without bias" and not be trolling?

From your link:
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended)."

Its not really paraphrasing when you make up ideas. That's called "reading between the lines", and you didn't even do that.

Re:ACID passed, real world?

[n0dalus]

2) The site doesn't block Opera per se, but exhibits "if IE or Netscape" behaviour. Of course Firefox deals with those, as it descends from Netscape. Opera doesn't, and Opera is not IE, either, so it end up in no man's land...

Actually, the real problem with Opera is that it tries to support both W3 DOM standards as well as IE's crazy broken stuff, but then goes on to do some things differently to IE. So, if because IE is broken in some regard and you check for a certain DOM element or function existence to see if it's IE (and act accordingly), Opera, in its attempt to emulate IE, ends up being broken by the hack.

It's hard enough for web developers to put up and deal with IE's crap, for then Opera to come along and get broken by all the hacks because it tries to emulate half of IE's behaviour. Then you have to put in more hacks so that Opera won't get broken by the IE-specific stuff.

Very close

[Lobais]

Only a few parts are missing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=acid2 [mozilla.org]
Firefox 2.0 should render it perfectly.