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I got a 93 on my ACID3 test with the latest nightly so I'm wondering where you got your numbers. Are you sure that you have the latest minefield?

See: http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Gecko is bloated. No one disputes this anymore, even within Mozilla. That is being worked on.

But outdated? I don't think so, or at least, it doesn't need to be. Fixing that is a matter of getting priorities back on track: standards support must be Job 1 again, and that means not just the specs but the test suites based on them.

The future of standards support is not in what specs you implement: it's in what tests you pass. Once the Gecko team wakes up and sees this, as its competitors have, then I believe we'll see it become competitive again.

Gecko is bloated. No one disputes this anymore, even within Mozilla. That is being worked on.

But outdated? I don't think so, or at least, it doesn't need to be. Fixing that is a matter of getting priorities back on track: standards support must be Job 1 again, and that means not just the specs but the test suites based on them.

The future of standards support is not in what specs you implement: it's in what tests you pass. Once the Gecko team wakes up and sees this, as its competitors have, then I believe we'll see it become competitive again.

Gecko is bloated. No one disputes this anymore, even within Mozilla. That is being worked on.

But outdated? I don't think so, or at least, it doesn't need to be. Fixing that is a matter of getting priorities back on track: standards support must be Job 1 again, and that means not just the specs but the test suites based on them.

The future of standards support is not in what specs you implement: it's in what tests you pass. Once the Gecko team wakes up and sees this, as its competitors have, then I believe we'll see it become competitive again.

I'm using Chrome right now, and so far, no issues. Actually, I really like it. When plugins are developed for Chrome, I can see myself using this as my primary browser. I did notice that gmail runs faster in Chrome. Also, the comic is quite entertaining for a geek...

JavaScript is blazingly fast. My work timesheet application, which is very 'Web 2' and bloatedly JavaScript heavy, runs extremely well with Chrome, but is virtually unusable with IE7 or Opera 9.5 due to poor JavaScript peroformance. Firefox is usable-ish, but Chrome is way better.

I currently have Chrome as my default browser on both my Windows machines but will stick with Opera on my Linux machines at least until there's a native Chrome port. So far, I'm very impressed - it's memory footprint seems consistently lower than Opera, and much lower than IE or Firefox; and Chrome's JavaScript performance is very much better than any of them. I'm seeing 79% on Acid3 as against 84% for Opera 9.52, 71% for Firefox 3.0.1 and 12% for Internet Exploder 7.

However, they must be using a much older version of Webkit. Chrome does NOT pass the ACID test 3, even though the latest Safari does. Also, Chrome still has the carpet bomb "bug" that Apple was criticized for (auto-downloads). http://acid3.acidtests.org/

As far as I can see Firefox 3 doesn't even pass the acid2 test perfectly. If you compare http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top and http://acid2.acidtests.org/reference.html you can see that the nose in the reference rendering is smaller. To pass the acid2 test it should match exactly.

As far as I can see Firefox 3 doesn't even pass the acid2 test perfectly. If you compare http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top and http://acid2.acidtests.org/reference.html you can see that the nose in the reference rendering is smaller. To pass the acid2 test it should match exactly.

Let's hope the Mozilla devs get the Acid3 test to work with Firefox 3.1.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

And how does that help normal browsing? The acid3 test was made just so that Opera could scream Fr1st P0st again.

Let's hope the Mozilla devs get the Acid3 test to work with Firefox 3.1.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

You mean like a formal standard for the language? That's ECMAScript. Do you mean a standard way of interfacing with the browser? That would be DOM. Or do you mean some practical tests of scripting to ensure that different browsers behave consistently? Sounds like Acid3.

On a mac, it's simple to install and remove the WebKit nightly. It's literally just dragging and dropping a specially built application.

1. Make sure you have the latest Safari installed. WebKit doesn't touch the User Interface, so you still need Safari around.
2. Go to the Webkit Nightly Builds site and click to download the Mac OS X version.
3. If you have "Open safe downloads" wisely turned off, you will need to find the file you downloaded (probably named WebKit-SVN-r#####.dmg) and open it. The disk image will mount and you will see a gold version of the Safari compass icon labelled WebKit. If your browser auto-opens "safe" downloads, just switch to the Finder and you'll see that gold WebKit icon all alone in a window.
4. Drag the gold WebKit icon into your Applications folder. It will not conflict or erase Safari since it has a different name. You are now done with the install image; you can eject and trash the .dmg file from your download folder.
5. To use the nightly builds of webkit, launch the gold WebKit app rather than Safari. The first time you will be warned by Mac OS X's security feature saying this was an app downloaded from the internet, go ahead and approve the launch. You may also be warned about the incompatibility of some browser plugins. Everything else should seem identical to Safari.

Now, you'll only be using the webkit libraries when browsing with that gold WebKit icon. To prove this to yourself, you can visit the Acid3 test page using both Safari and Webkit without quitting either and see very different results. Safari still has major incompatibilities while WebKit seems almost perfect.

Finally, when you are ready to uninstall WebKit, quit the app and drag the gold colored icon from the applications folder to the trash. Or, drag a new version that you download the next day on top to replace the old nightly.

I can access the Acid3 test without problem. I also wonder if this will cause Safari to pass the performance aspect of Acid3. If it doesn't now, it looks like it soon will.

There's a reference rendering. I guess they calculated how it should look based on the specs they used in the test.

Until I can browse and see 100/100 on my screen, I don't see it as too late. 98/100 is the highest I've seen when browsing http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Apparently Duke Nukem Forever is a great game, too...

With Firefox 2.0.0.13 I've been doing just find rendering the render image properly!

http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html

That's because you didn't link to the test itself. That action page, it seems to have a highlight on every t on Firefox 2.

All ACID tests are attempts at benchmarking the ability of a browser to apply standards (W3C standards, to be specific) correctly. Unless your browser showed you the image exactly as it appears here http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html, your browser did not pass the ACID3 test.

I do not see any "'t's in reversed yellow boxes" in the reference document, so I am going to go out on a limb and suggest your browser does not pass the ACID3 test.

It seems the standard has improved a little bit also. http://acid3.acidtests.org/ now reports 67% instead of 61% for the previous beta. It actually reported 66% on first opening the page and then on each subsequent refresh 67%.

Curiously the index page for http://www.acidtests.org/ does not pass the W3C Validator ;)

Warning: No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
Warning: Unable to Determine Parse Mode!
Error: Line 1, Column 14: no internal or external document type declaration subset; will parse without validation.
Warning: Line 43, Column 47: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "lt".
Error: Line 43, Column 47: general entity "lt" not defined and no default entity.
Error: Line 43, Column 49: reference to entity "lt" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info: Line 43, Column 46: entity was defined here.

The acid test website notes that the test may change over time as until it is debugged. Surely the page of collected results needs to record which version of the ACID3 test was used for each test, or at least the date on which each result was obtained?

IE8 doesn't pass Acid2! I think it cheats!

Check it out quickly guys!

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ PASS

http://acid2.acidtests.org/ FAIL

The only thing different between these tests is a 404 link on about line 130 of the source. Is IE8 cheating?!!!

Woo hoo! IE 6.0 displays this just fine: http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html Read 'em and weep Firefox!

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

.. http://acid3.acidtests.org/

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Firefox gets a 50 for me. (And a FAIL in the corner)

Why does slashdot keep linking to dead blogs?

The actual test is http://acid3.acidtests.org/ here.

I got a 50/100 at http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080207 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.12

the test is here.

i'm getting a 50/100 in Firefox.

...But the picture wouldn't be complete without this: I've gone and tested IE7 with ACID3. It scored a spectacular 4 (four) out of 100! That's while, I remind you, all other major browser engines out there score today in the 40-90 range. Even those versions, and this is important, that were out before the ACID3 test was around. See what it means to plan ahead and work with standards?

What does this tell me? That, while IE7 does a lot better than IE6, it becomes apparent that this is done with skin-deep tricks. They didn't do anything new. They needed something to pacify the angry mob until v8 came out, so they hacked on the IE6 engine to produce "nice" rendering. Together with the revamped interface it's something meant to stop Microsoft bleeding browser marketshare. Smart.

But not acid3...

Not that that matters yet. Acid2 is cool enough for me.