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no browser properly handles CSS. NONE. Except maybe Opera, which at least can pass ACID2.

No, not even Opera. Keep in mind that Acid2 is not a compliance test. It tells you that the browser handles a certain set of HTML, CSS, protocols and errors properly, but it doesn't indicate full and/or proper implementation of any level of CSS.

There's a great set of comparisons at WebDevout.net (surf around the site for more detailed tables). Opera 9 is certainly in the lead with 94% of CSS 2.1 by that site's metrics, compared to 90% for Firefox 1.5, 57% for IE7 and 51% for IE6. But none of the browsers makes it to 100%.

The code will be as good as the support in their browser. See how this stacks up in a Browser comparison

You know what you were told to do, and you know what you were told not to do. I think that meeting went something like...

"Firefox is making people realize that IE is crap, we need to do some damage control. We need a new version of IE."

"OK."

"Plus, Longhorn is a good enough reason to upgrade IE, right? Add IE7 to the list of Vista-only features... On second thought, since we don't know when Longhorn will ship, we better be prepared with a build for XP, but only for Service Pack 2."

"OK."

"We'll completely reconfigure the security model, that'll drive Administrators nuts, haha!"

"HA!"

"Security improvements are top priority. Exploits for IE are coming out almost weekly, and the patch team can't keep up."

"Yessir."

"But those damn developers have been whining for standards compliance for years now. Let's throw them a bone or two. What can we fix to shut them up for a while?"

"Well, there's a lot we don't have right, sir... PNG transparency, various RFC violations, real XML support, our CSS could really use a major overhaul--"

"Alright, let's give 'em PNG transparency. Most people seemed to buy the bullshit we've been stalling with for this."

"Yessir."

"But most of the compliance complaints I hear about have to do with this CSS thing. Apparently there's this site called, um... Position Is Everything dot net that has better documentation of these CSS bugs than our internal tools."

"Yessir."

"I dunno, pick 10 or so that'll take the least amount of time to fix, but that we can make the biggest deal about. Try to pick the ones with names, and make the developers rue the day they asked for standards compliance in IE."

"Yessir."

"But remember, only spend about 10% of your time on compliance. There's a new security model to develop before it goes to retail for testing, and we might as well make the user interface of the new IE completely different from the other browsers... so if anyone switches from IE, they won't be able to figure out how to use Firefox. Move the buttons around or something."

"Yessir. But won't a new UI confuse the people still using IE6?"

"They'll just have to get used to it. Now get to work."

Now, almost 2 years later, we get to see the results, and the numbers don't lie. Sorry, Chris, we know a mandated token effort when we see one.

Someone, or more likely several someones, will independantly enumerate every area of non-compliance that exists in MSIE7.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php

Safari, which integrates much better with its host OS, has superior support for standards, and is in general much more asthetically aware (as is its core development team).

Granted that Safari integrates better with its host OS and is more aesthetic... what makes you think it has better standards support than Firefox? Not Acid2, I hope.

Acid2, by its own admission, is not a compliance test, and passing it does not indicate a particular level of standards compliance. What Acid2 tests is a set of relatively unused pieces of the specs that most browsers got wrong at the time it was written. Think of it as making sure the corners are covered. It's still possible for one browser to cover 80% of the room, missing the corners, and another to cover 70% of the room, but get the corners.

Webdevout's comparison is pretty reliable, though unfortunately they haven't checked Safari as thoroughly as Firefox, IE, and Opera. In the sections on which Safari has been tested most thoroughly: CSS 2.1 and the changes for CSS 3, Firefox matches or exceeds Safari on all points except for pseudo-elements.

Or look at two browsers that both pass Acid2: Safari 2 and Opera 9 (same link). Notice that there are some places where Safari exceeds Opera's coverage, and some where Opera exceed's Safari's. There are even places where Firefox 1.5 -- which doesn't pass Acid2 -- exceeds Opera's coverage (HTML and CSS 3 changes), though Opera has better coverage of CSS 2.1.

I would guess that, if someone has a more thorough comparison, Firefox 1.5 would have better standards support overall than Safari 2, and Opera 9 would either be slightly ahead or more or less tied with Firefox 1.5 (again, overall).

Thank you for your link. I found another link from your link which answers my question from above.

Here's the link that goes over all the figures: http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp?uas=IE6-IE7-FX1_5-OP8-OP9

Unfortunately ACID2 is useless as a test because it focuses on IE rendering problems. There are lots of issues in the test which are very unlikely to crop up in most web pages, similarly there are quite a few issues in other browsers which pop up quite regularly (although people ignore those because "Firefox must be doing it right")

The point is that ACID2 is nothing more than a way for geeks to point at IE and laugh. Sure, IE isn't a nice browser to work with or code for, but at least let it lose a fair summary rather than a biased one.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

I'll repeat parts of a post in another article:

Please, please, stop repeating this. Standards Compliance and the Acid Test are only _related_ topics. The Acid 2 Test is not a proof of standards compliance.

Once people like yourself starting seeing the Acid Test as a proof of standards compliance, it stopped having any meaning. Programmers would/could prioritize those bugs standing in the way of passing the Acid 2 Test, while other, possibly more important issues wrt. standards compliance were treated as less important.

Even a moron in a hurry ;) would understand that passing the Acid 2 Test only means you're passing the Acid 2 Test. It doesn't even mean that you properly included the standards needed to pass the Acid 2 Test. And even less that you're (fully) standards compliant.

Please take a look at a comprehensive list comparing standards compliance before claiming lack of standards compliance in Firefox (or other browsers)

IE 7 still did not correctly implement the box model, positioning, all CSS1, all CSS2, or any CSS3.

Of course, no one else implements all of CSS2 either. Though everyone else seems to be pretty far ahead of MSIE in that respect.

For that matter, why aren't we (as a community) grilling Firefox for their lack of standards compatibility? What would it take for them to 'get the picture'

How about a Firefox plugin that e-mails the Firefox foundation everytime you start Firefox?

Ie 7 does *not* implement all of the CSS1 features, let alone CSS 2 and 3.

David Hammond has taken the time to test it and put up a comparsion matrix:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php

get your facts straight, IE7 will not implement much more CSS support than IE6 did. Let's just hope they get the screwed box model redering fixed (as promised for strict mode).

IE7 will basicly be an IE6 redering engine with little more css2 support, a new UI, and hopefully a fixed box model that's about it!

Cheers,
-S

IE 7 doesn't implement all of CSS 1, a standard that's pushing 10 years old.

It does, however, implement a hell of a lot more of CSS than IE6, and has fixed quite a few CSS bugs. It's a lot more than "IE 6 with a tab bar."

(While we're at it, does *any* browser implement all of CSS1? The main reference I know of only deals with CSS2 and CSS3.)

While I'm disappointed that IE7 doesn't catch up with Opera, Firefox and Safari, I also have to admit that IE7 represents a huge improvement over the previous version.

There are a few errors in this summary, and I'll try to address them one-by-one.

Opera 9 is not "the only browser to pass the ACID2 test". Safari passed it first, followed by iCab, then Konqueror, and Firefox recently passed it in the reflow branch that will be incorporated into Firefox 3 (the next version of Firefox to have any significant layout engine improvements).

That said, the Acid2 test certainly does not imply standards compliance. It really doesn't test that many things, and I can tell you right now that Safari's layout engine is overall buggier than Firefox and Opera. Even things like background images don't work properly in certain not uncommon situations (when the background is set to no-repeat, positioned off the side of the box, and the box is smaller than the single non-repeating image, Safari will actually repeat the background).

It does not remain to be seen whether IE7 is better. The current IE7 beta is feature complete, and the IE developers have said many times that the layout engine won't be changed before the final release. I've thoroughly tested the IE7 beta and added the information to my standards support tables. The overall CSS 2.1 support went from 52% to 55%, compared to Firefox and Opera which both have 93%, and the only CSS 3 additions were the four new basic selectors. HTML and DOM support did not change significantly.

As far as developing websites, for me it's always been easiest to write to the standards first so that it'll work nearly perfectly in just about everything first go, and then add a layer of hacks for Internet Explorer and maybe a tweak here and there for other browsers. The Internet Explorer developers have made it clear that they intend to "build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards", so if you continue to develop on a browser-by-browser basis from the start, you'll have to continue rewriting a lot of your site every time a new version of IE or something comes out with fixes for the bugs you're leaning on. Bill Gates himself said that they plan to release a new version of Internet Explorer every 9 to 12 months.

Except that IE7's standards support improvement on IE6 is VERY weak and minor. I didn't realise just how minor until I looked at this.

Fuck Microsoft. The vast majority of their work in IE7 has been to change the interface so now the browser looks as ugly (yes, ugly) as its latest Media Player, and implement tabbed browsing so some people will say "ooh, cool".

But standards-support wise, it is still Crap.

Eh, I'm not worried.

Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. Is it possible to get a site that will infect Firefox? Probably. Does that make it logical to run to IE for safety? No more than it makes sense to move from the wooded rural countryside to an LA war-zone because you're afraid of a tree falling on your head.

At the current moment, IE has 33 advisories to Firefox's 2. 34 vulnerabilities to FF's 3. And IE averages 449 days to fix a vulnerability, compared to an average of 83 for Firefox.

(Source: http://www.webdevout.net/security_summary.php )

Considering that most of the recent vulnerabilities in IE6 have been present in IE7 as well, I really don't see it as being some massive change from Microsoft's traditional level of development.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support.php?uas=I E6-IE7-FX1_5-OP8#css

Erm, if that doesn't set it up with IE7 for you, click the link at the very top (to change which browsers show).

Although Firefox is a heck of a lot safer than IE, Opera currently has a better security standing.

(This correction would have been posted much sooner if Slashdot did not have an insanely long timeout on ac posts).

Web browser security summary

(As of March 23, 2006) "Internet Explorer has had 47 advisories. 11 were marked as moderately critical, 8 were marked as highly critical, and 5 were marked as extremely critical. There are still 36 open advisories, including 10 that were marked as moderately critical, 2 that were marked as highly critical, and 1 that was marked as extremely critical.

Firefox has had 24 advisories. 8 were marked as moderately critical, 7 were marked as highly critical, and 0 were marked as extremely critical. There are still 2 open advisories, including 1 that was marked as moderately critical.

Opera has had 17 advisories. 10 were marked as moderately critical, 2 were marked as highly critical, and 0 were marked as extremely critical. All reported vulnerabilities have since been fixed."

Just one of the many reasons that I love Opera .

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_dom.php#s tandards
Here. Safari boy needed a link to this, but you do too.
Awful lot of red there for "comprehensive and functional."
Hell. Even Firefox 1.0 was beating it by a mile.
Not surprising since DOM support is tacked on to IE but is core to the friggen interface of Gecko browsers. Maybe M16 was a slow crash fest, but that was over 6 years ago.
Troll?
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Dumbass.
Merely pointing out that the lack of a proper DOM is what makes it so hard for IE to do basic XML tricks, among other things.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_dom.php#s upport-domevents-mutationevent