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It follows the standards better in my experience, too. Still waiting for Chrome to catch up.

I've noticed Firefox has been regressing on Acid3 lately. I only see 97/100 and it doesn't look like the reference.

This is in no way a complicated issue! There is no "wrenching of hands as to which way to go". There is a standards committee: w3c, also known as the world wide web consortium. And their sole purpose in life is to build standards for internet browsers, and to test the w3c compliance of those browsers. There are even tests for html5. All that is needed is to abandon the "lock-in", "incompatible" model that microsoft has plagued the computing industry with for the past 35 years (including their own software not compatible with older versions of their software), and there will be no problems.

This is in no way a complicated issue! There is no "wrenching of hands as to which way to go". There is a standards committee: w3c, also known as the world wide web consortium. And their sole purpose in life is to build standards for internet browsers, and to test the w3c compliance of those browsers. There are even tests for html5. All that is needed is to abandon the "lock-in", "incompatible" model that microsoft has plagued the computing industry with for the past 35 years (including their own software not compatible with older versions of their software), and there will be no problems.

If IE was going to focus on actual standards compliance you'd see their HTML5 compliance higher than webkit browsers offer, and it's not.

On ACID 3, w/ IE9+, it's 100%, so I'm curious as to how much higher you'd like that number to be?

http://acid3.acidtests.org

-AC

I must have a problem expressing myself, for you are accusing me of not liking standards when I do know they are what makes the web today manageable. And I respect and love them.

Well, all major "things" in the internet, those who make it working and useful, have been brought to us with that "theoretical, academical process" you dislike. It's your right, of course.

Please cite me ONE of my sentences that can be construed to mean that I dislike that process. I bet you can't. I do like and respect that process. However I do believe that people should be allowed to use the implementations as they see fit. I don't believe everyone should be restrained from using anything that hasn't been published in a final state.

What you are pushing forward is known as "act soon, fix later" because "there's no time" or because "we need it yesterday". This is what I personally dislike a lot.

That's absolutely not what I am pushing forward. If something works in ALL browsers and is a part of a draft standard and is widely used, I think it's a safe bet that it won't disappear from browsers overnight. It's also a safe bet that it won't disappear from the standard. So I think it's a safe bet that you won't have to fix it later. As a result, I think it would be silly to not use said features, just because "but the standard is in a draft state".

You say all browsers support the "interim HTML5".
Have you tried this site with ALL your browsers? Also the mobile ones?
Each of them only partially supports one of the intermediate drafts. Which is a two level uncertainty. And what about this one?
You surely know about the "cross browser" issues with Javascript. It started with two different implementations of a non-standardized scripting language. There are still hundreds of lines of code being run in almost all web pages just to cope with it.
And if you think about the big mess all the current browsers are doing with the mature HTML4 and CSS2, you can imagine how messy the scenario will be with HTML5. Web sites will still need to support all those dialects and variants of the HTML5, if they want to show the intended way.

No, all browsers don't support everything, this is true. However there is a sizeable subset of HTML5 and CSS3 that is supported by all latest versions of all browsers. I find it silly to advise people not to use that subset. So I do and I advise people to use it.

Look, a stupid bug is not being fixed in any open source browser. It's about a core HTML4 element which has forced hundreds of HTML publishers to look for partial workarounds.

Sure, but the world is not all black and white. I'm advocating a particular shade of gray, that is all. Of course, don't use something that is broken in most browsers. And no, there will never be a time when all bugs will be fixed and all implementations will be alike. Hopefully, that will never happen. So we'll always have to cope with cross-browser compatibility issues. This is the reality of life. You may live in a w3c smelling ivory tower of cross-browser compatibility heaven, but I do build websites in the meantime. So I cope with it.

So, in my humble opinion, standards matter. And also a lot.

In mine too.

Well, all major "things" in the internet, those who make it working and useful, have been brought to us with that "theoretical, academical process" you dislike. It's your right, of course.
What you are pushing forward is known as "act soon, fix later" because "there's no time" or because "we need it yesterday". This is what I personally dislike a lot.
You say all browsers support the "interim HTML5".
Have you tried this site with ALL your browsers? Also the mobile ones?
Each of them only partially supports one of the intermediate drafts. Which is a two level uncertainty. And what about this one?
You surely know about the "cross browser" issues with Javascript. It started with two different implementations of a non-standardized scripting language. There are still hundreds of lines of code being run in almost all web pages just to cope with it.
And if you think about the big mess all the current browsers are doing with the mature HTML4 and CSS2, you can imagine how messy the scenario will be with HTML5. Web sites will still need to support all those dialects and variants of the HTML5, if they want to show the intended way.
Look, a stupid bug is not being fixed in any open source browser. It's about a core HTML4 element which has forced hundreds of HTML publishers to look for partial workarounds.

So, in my humble opinion, standards matter. And also a lot.

Whats weird is I installed the adwords & google analytics optout addons for chrome. It messes up the rendering on certain pages (e.g. acid3 test)

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

This is what I get : http://i.imgur.com/HvY5U.png

I was wondering about this, and if Chrome has layout rendering bugs, or if those bugs are hacks + work-arounds for other browsers.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/ agrees with the latter.

Indeed it is. Its small footprint also means it runs on embedded devices, and it happens to be one of very few browsers that score 100% on the ACID 3 test.

How does it do on the ACID 3 Test which Chrome passes 100/100 and IE8 gets 20/100 (although maybe I could make it pass by droping my IE security pants, which I'm reluctant to do).

I guess I should have. http://acid3.acidtests.org/ is a good measure of the various rendering implementations of browsers.

The problem: older sites are hacked together to accommodate bugs and workarounds in older browsers. Changing the source on-the-fly could potentially break these workarounds.

Even Microsoft says so, in their not-so-many-words way:

Some Web sites are designed for older browsers. You may experience compatibility issues on these sites until they are updated for Internet Explorer 8 or for Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

For reference:

FF 3.6.9 = 94/100
Chrome 6.0.472 = 100/100
IE 8 = 20/100 (yup, security disallows the test by default) and enabling it (illegal according the the test rules) fares no better.

FAIL - it says so on the test results!

At least the Linux version for x86_64.
Try it

I wonder if this version will get past 12/100 on the Acid3 test.

Man I love this relentless focus on browser speed over the past few years. If it keeps up for a little longer, I might even be able to browse Slashdot.

On a related note, to speed and compatibility, what about the acid test? My Windows Safari 4 scored 100, but about 5 tests are slow: 26 40 43 65 69. The last one completes after 102 attempts on my machine, which I hope is better now.

Mind you, this is a Dell single core XP SP2 machine, but Safari's engine should produce faster but scalable results.
PS: Click on the "A" in acid3 to get the detailed result window.
PPS: Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 got a 97/100 on the same machine, with twice as many slow tests as Safari 4, but only 47 attempts at test #69

• IE7 passes Acid1, fails Acid2
• IE8 passes Acid1 and Acid2, fails Acid3 (21/100 for me)
• FF3.6.3 passes Acid2, nearly passes Acid3 (94/100 for me)
• Opera and Chrome pass Acid3

Passing Acid2 was the big one for me. This makes sense, as Acid2 focuses on basic CSS compliance while Acid3 focuses on more cutting-edge web tech, per wikipedia.

http://bit.ly/adukJN:

In its last several releases, everyone's favorite Open Source browser has become an unstable mess of add-ons, plugins, and other hacks that chew up memory like a fat kid with a chocolate-dipped corn dog. In fact, just last week, SecurityFocus released news of a devastating exploit in Firefox 3.5.5 that they blame squarely on its unstable architecture.

From its infancy Firefox has been the product of collaborative effort, unifying code from hackers worldwide. But thanks to the Hayes Law, we see that there is a "sweet spot" to such a development style, and that Firefox has long since left it behind. In the chart below, we can see that the number of Firefox developers has increased exponentially since 2002, and that number will more than double in 2010.

But it's time to be honest: either Firefox, as a modern web browser, will have killer performance on 64-bit, multicore Intel chips or it's not worth downloading and installing. And since, as we have seen in the recent past, that Firefox is actually getting slower with each release, Firefox is certainly a waste of time for anyone who takes their web browsing seriously.

The Hayes Law states that, given a specific type of software project, there is a certain complexity associated with it, and with that complexity an optimal number of developers. It's actually a little more complicated than that, taking into account development model, coding platform, programming language, and code repository platform, but in the end it's easy to plug in the numbers and see where a project's headed.

Against the Hayes Law, Firefox appears to have jumped the shark sometime after the Firefox 2.0 in 2006. The next major release, Firefox 3.0 in 2008, introduced many issues users today complain about: bloat, sloth, instability, and insatiable hunger for memory. Firefox user complaints increased in tandem, all syncing up with the jump in developers. Ergo Firefox's problem: too many cocks in the kitchen.

To further underline this growing problem, Firefox completely falls down in Acid3: Firefox 3.5 scores 93/100, and Firefox 3.6 scores only 87/100. Needless to say, Firefox 4.0 mockups score 0/100. Sadly, this is a continuation of a trend: Firefox took the longest of all browsers to beat Acid2. And don't even think about Acid4. Firefox is collapsing under its own weight.

The core of this problem looms: the number of developers, as seen in the chart above, will only continue to skyrocket for Firefox 3.6 and beyond. By the time Firefox 4.0 is released, sometime in December 2010, the number of developers will be nearly 4,000, almost a full magnitude greater than the optimal 445 or so in 2006. Clearly, Firefox is about to capsize.

So what is to be done? Users can petition the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation to rethink their development model, focus on optimization instead of new features, and perhaps backpedaling on some of the less sensible projects like Mozilla Mobile and the non-standard XUL interface. Concerned individuals should log into Mozill

http://bit.ly/adukJN:

In its last several releases, everyone's favorite Open Source browser has become an unstable mess of add-ons, plugins, and other hacks that chew up memory like a fat kid with a chocolate-dipped corn dog. In fact, just last week, SecurityFocus released news of a devastating exploit in Firefox 3.5.5 that they blame squarely on its unstable architecture.

From its infancy Firefox has been the product of collaborative effort, unifying code from hackers worldwide. But thanks to the Hayes Law, we see that there is a "sweet spot" to such a development style, and that Firefox has long since left it behind. In the chart below, we can see that the number of Firefox developers has increased exponentially since 2002, and that number will more than double in 2010.

But it's time to be honest: either Firefox, as a modern web browser, will have killer performance on 64-bit, multicore Intel chips or it's not worth downloading and installing. And since, as we have seen in the recent past, that Firefox is actually getting slower with each release, Firefox is certainly a waste of time for anyone who takes their web browsing seriously.

The Hayes Law states that, given a specific type of software project, there is a certain complexity associated with it, and with that complexity an optimal number of developers. It's actually a little more complicated than that, taking into account development model, coding platform, programming language, and code repository platform, but in the end it's easy to plug in the numbers and see where a project's headed.

Against the Hayes Law, Firefox appears to have jumped the shark sometime after the Firefox 2.0 in 2006. The next major release, Firefox 3.0 in 2008, introduced many issues users today complain about: bloat, sloth, instability, and insatiable hunger for memory. Firefox user complaints increased in tandem, all syncing up with the jump in developers. Ergo Firefox's problem: too many cocks in the kitchen.

To further underline this growing problem, Firefox completely falls down in Acid3: Firefox 3.5 scores 93/100, and Firefox 3.6 scores only 87/100. Needless to say, Firefox 4.0 mockups score 0/100. Sadly, this is a continuation of a trend: Firefox took the longest of all browsers to beat Acid2. And don't even think about Acid4. Firefox is collapsing under its own weight.

The core of this problem looms: the number of developers, as seen in the chart above, will only continue to skyrocket for Firefox 3.6 and beyond. By the time Firefox 4.0 is released, sometime in December 2010, the number of developers will be nearly 4,000, almost a full magnitude greater than the optimal 445 or so in 2006. Clearly, Firefox is about to capsize.

So what is to be done? Users can petition the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation to rethink their development model, focus on optimization instead of new features, and perhaps backpedaling on some of the less sensible projects like Mozilla Mobile and the non-standard XUL interface. Concerned individuals should log into Mozill

http://bit.ly/adukJN:

In its last several releases, everyone's favorite Open Source browser has become an unstable mess of add-ons, plugins, and other hacks that chew up memory like a fat kid with a chocolate-dipped corn dog. In fact, just last week, SecurityFocus released news of a devastating exploit in Firefox 3.5.5 that they blame squarely on its unstable architecture.

From its infancy Firefox has been the product of collaborative effort, unifying code from hackers worldwide. But thanks to the Hayes Law, we see that there is a "sweet spot" to such a development style, and that Firefox has long since left it behind. In the chart below, we can see that the number of Firefox developers has increased exponentially since 2002, and that number will more than double in 2010.

But it's time to be honest: either Firefox, as a modern web browser, will have killer performance on 64-bit, multicore Intel chips or it's not worth downloading and installing. And since, as we have seen in the recent past, that Firefox is actually getting slower with each release, Firefox is certainly a waste of time for anyone who takes their web browsing seriously.

The Hayes Law states that, given a specific type of software project, there is a certain complexity associated with it, and with that complexity an optimal number of developers. It's actually a little more complicated than that, taking into account development model, coding platform, programming language, and code repository platform, but in the end it's easy to plug in the numbers and see where a project's headed.

Against the Hayes Law, Firefox appears to have jumped the shark sometime after the Firefox 2.0 in 2006. The next major release, Firefox 3.0 in 2008, introduced many issues users today complain about: bloat, sloth, instability, and insatiable hunger for memory. Firefox user complaints increased in tandem, all syncing up with the jump in developers. Ergo Firefox's problem: too many cocks in the kitchen.

To further underline this growing problem, Firefox completely falls down in Acid3: Firefox 3.5 scores 93/100, and Firefox 3.6 scores only 87/100. Needless to say, Firefox 4.0 mockups score 0/100. Sadly, this is a continuation of a trend: Firefox took the longest of all browsers to beat Acid2. And don't even think about Acid4. Firefox is collapsing under its own weight.

The core of this problem looms: the number of developers, as seen in the chart above, will only continue to skyrocket for Firefox 3.6 and beyond. By the time Firefox 4.0 is released, sometime in December 2010, the number of developers will be nearly 4,000, almost a full magnitude greater than the optimal 445 or so in 2006. Clearly, Firefox is about to capsize.

So what is to be done? Users can petition the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation to rethink their development model, focus on optimization instead of new features, and perhaps backpedaling on some of the less sensible projects like Mozilla Mobile and the non-standard XUL interface. Concerned individuals should log into Mozill

Internet Explorer is fastest only on Facebook and Yahoo!'s websites (both very popular websites and partners of Microsoft)? This is probably just a coincidence, but I've heard rumors before of MS inserting special code for, say, the Acid3 Test. Probably just paranoia ...

The Chrome version I'm using [4.0.223.16] passes the Acid 3 test with a score of 100. I'm not sure how long it's been this way. I've been using it since around the time they released ChromeFrame and it's been compliant since then.

I like Chrome because it renders well, it's fast, and I find it unobtrusive. Unless IE9 provides a much better user experience I'll only use it to do stuff at Microsoft domains.

"Acid3 is the third in a series of test pages written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

Acid3 is primarily testing specifications for “Web 2.0 dynamic Web applications. Also there
are some visual rendering tests, including webfonts. Here is the list of specifications tested:

• DOM2 Core
• DOM2 Events
• DOM2 HTML
• DOM2 Range
• DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, )
• DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker)
• DOM2 Views (defaultView)
• ECMAScript
• HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, )
• HTTP (Content-Type, 404, )
• Media Queries
• Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic changes, )
• XHTML 1.0
• CSS2 (@font-face)
• CSS2.1 (’inline-block’, ‘pre-wrap’, parsing)
• CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), )
• CSS3 UI (’cursor’)
• data: URIs
• SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, )"

I am using Safari 4.0.4 / Mac 10.5.8:

Acid 1 - pass
Acid 2 - fail
Acid 3 - 100%

http://www.acidtests.org/

Wow. Someone certainly has a bee in their bonnet.

The standards to which I alluded are defined by independent organizations, such as W3C, Ecma, IETF and others, and have been championed by such organizations as the Web Standards Project. Web slices is technically "open" as you said -- and as such, has even been incorporated into Firefox via plug-ins as early as Ff2.0 -- but the "standard" for web slices was actually developed and published by Microsoft, with little or no collaboration from the rest of the industry. So with that, you're really attempting to compare apples and... well, Microsoft.

Webkit is most assuredly not the only browser to strive for (real) standards compliance... if you had followed the news surrounding the release of the Acid3 test a couple of years ago, you would already know this.

My comment about Firefox plug-ins was really more of a reflection upon the days when Firefox was my default browser, and a rumination on the lack of similar add-ins in Safari -- but frankly, I can live without them. And I couldn't possibly care less what language Firefox used to develop their plug-ins; other browsers have plug-ins too, and they're not all based upon XUL. If the folks over at mozilla.org ever did decide to chuck Gecko, and instead built a plug-in framework around Webkit and dubbed it the next version of Firefox, I am confident that they would have no difficulty at all finding a way to make it work. Likewise, I am certain that third-party plug-in developers would moan and groan about having to recode their plug-ins... but most of them would still do the work, and we'd all be quite happy with the end results.

Now, with the red herrings out of the way... to directly address the question you posed: I suppose I can see how you might interpret my comment as "less" competition, but that is the furthest thing from my mind. You state quite accurately that Internet Explorer isn't supplying any competition, but frankly, that's because they're now the incumbent. They don't have to bring the battle at all... someone else needs to bring the battle to them. With that in mind, what I desire is stronger competition against the Microsoft juggernaut, which might ultimately result in real progress across the board, which can only be defined as directly influencing the juggernaut itself. And let's face it: Opera may be almost exactly as standards compliant as Webkit, (and a halfway decent browser in its own right) but it's not exactly big enough to drive the market in any meaningful way on its own, right? So they're not much help. There are several other even smaller players out there, but they'll never even show up on a market share pie chart as anything more then a speck, and it's quite rare indeed for any of them to come up with something so innovative or useful that it actually propagates beyond the narrow scope of that one browser. And obviously the most noticeable non-Microsoft slice on that chart is the open source efforts of Firefox/Mozilla -- but they've been running at a distant second place to Microsoft in this race since their inception, and in all that time, all they've really managed to accomplish for us is to popularize a few key features, such as tabbed browsing, which was actually a concept borrowed from one of those lesser known browsers.

In other words, I'm not saying I want Opera and Konqueror and iCab to all just go away... rather, I simply want to see a new champion come forth to challenge Microsoft's indisputable dominance, picking up the battle that Firefox has effectively abandoned. And more importantly, I would like to see that champion steal enough market share away from Internet

Having passed all of the different Acid Tests with a perfect score on the latest JavaScript oriented Acid test.

My thumbnail look at Sunspider scores shows about a 20% overall speedup over the latest Firefox beta, but Firefox wins in enough of the individual tests that I expect BOTH to improve quite a bit, that is if the fastest times on each are used, even Chrome's time would be 20% better.

Having passed all of the different Acid Tests with a perfect score on the latest JavaScript oriented Acid test.

My thumbnail look at Sunspider scores shows about a 20% overall speedup over the latest Firefox beta, but Firefox wins in enough of the individual tests that I expect BOTH to improve quite a bit, that is if the fastest times on each are used, even Chrome's time would be 20% better.

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new SpiderMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell! Get rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 5 page open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. S

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new SpiderMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 5 page open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-p

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-p

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Sometimes

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Som

on the Acid3 test, lagging both Opera and Safari which have reached 100% on this fun benchmark. About 50% faster on avg when I "thumb in the air" tested it (ran 10X and wrote down the times, then averaged them than Firefox was as little as six months ago, so this release is definitely one to pick up in terms of browser security and performance, though.

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Sometimes

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Som

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Som

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.

Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Sometimes

Sadly, lynx fails Acid3 for some reason.

Looks like everybody's trying out their new installations on the Acid Tests 'cause it's /.'d.

You need a citation!? I thought it was just obvious to everyone here. Anyways, here's a citation. Try viewing this in IE8 and you tell me how much you believe that they're better at web standards than the competition: http://acid3.acidtests.org/

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

Just got 2.0 and went straight to http://acid3.acidtests.org/: Passed 100/100.

You have a different definition of "fine" than I do, then, since in my Firefox 3.0.10, the smiley is missing its eyes and has a red box over them instead.

Apparently the Acid2 on webstandards.org Acid2 on acidtests.org behave differently. Acid2 on webstandards.org renders instantly, but Acid2 on acidtests.org has a red box until the "Connecting to damowmow.com"/"Waiting for damowmow.com" disappears from the status bar, and then the red box is replaced with eyes. But given the slow response time and intermittent timeouts of the version on acidtests.org today, I think acidtests.org might be slashdotted.

...because it can't render everything properly?

What are you talking about, it gets an amazing 20/100 on the Acid 3 test.

"Can somebody tell me why programmers of open source browsers decide not to code to standards?"

The real question should be why do programmers write web apps that display differently on differing browsers. Assuming this isn't willful sabotage unlike the case of MS making Hotmail not work on Opera. This was achieved by moving text 30 pixels to the left so as to make the text look all jagged.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/
http://www.w3.org/

I don't know about you, but the only website I've ever had problems with in IE was .... Slashdot.
 

This? Now try it with ~any browser other than IE.

For the lazy (source):
~Any up-to-date-but-still-stable browser renders it correctly (read: the page doesn't look munged), except for IE, chrome, safari, and other webkit-based browsers. ~Any RC/alpha/etc gets a score upwards of 80, except for IE.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

I've got a coworker that is an IE fanatic. He keeps pointing out that IE uses less memory than FF, he's right. He also tallies up whenever I complain of a crash vs when he complains of one... and he's winning (as in fewer crashes).

I love being anti-m$, but you can't just dismiss their product as second-rate because you want it to be.

If firefox supported as little as IE, it would likely use much less memory. Is it not more appropriate to measure a browser by how well it supports the web standards that browsers are built to read? MS can't even be bothered to implement all of the standard html tags. IE 8 will finally support the frickin' <q> tag from HTML 4. That's a hard one too... replace the <q> tags with quote characters. It's rocket science really. No wonder it has taken MS more than a decade to support it. Next, run IE through a CSS support test page. Maybe give Acid3 a shot with it. Things aren't looking so pretty for IE, are they? Now try opening an XHTML page with it. Oh, sorry... IE is unable to read xhtml. It just downloads it to disk. It also doesn't support SVG, or MathML, or ruby. Firefox on the other hand, does.

Of course IE isn't second rate. It's not even good enough to qualify as third rate. I'm sure that's the primary reason MS is bleeding browser share at an accelerating rate.

This is really strange. I ran Acid3 but Chrome version 1.0 only gets a score of 79. Quite a few months ago I tried a nightly of Chromium which was getting 100/100 - so, what's happened to that?

The acid test is will it now pass the http://acid3.acidtests.org/ ?