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Microsoft have said that Acid2 is not a priority for them, and I doubt the final version of IE7 will work either.

No joke! Did they suddenly become standards compliant? If not, that is really bad news. It looks great, but if I can't design a website using web standards and have IE7 display it properly, then it's no good to me as a developer. What's the point? Ooo, new pretty interface that looks nearly EXACTLY like Firefox, but with a neat tab preview thingy... but does not display web pages worth poop. Sorry, did I miss something here? Isn't the point of a browser to be able to correctly display the majority of web pages currently on the web? Not a flame, just a major concern.

Apparently it passes the Acid2 Test.

It quick renders Digg.com (sometimes it takes ages on IE6), but I can barely click on the One Pixel Banner.

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml is the reference, not the test. Of course it looks right.

I just installed IE 7 Beta 2 from the Microsoft Website and using the test provided here:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml

IE 7 passed the test with flying colors. The only browser that does this good is Konqueror.

Joe

For comparison purposes, here are also:

The reference rendering.
Safari rendering I captured with Grab.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="styles.css" />

I'm almost afraid to ask, but does it pass the ACID test?

{
Opera is perhaps the most standards compliant browser out there.
}

Er, no.

Do you run MacOS? Open this page in Opera:
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#to p

Now open it in Safari.

If you're on Linux: Open the same URL in Opera.
Now open it in Konqueror (3.5.x)

Which one doesn't fail miserably?

Unlikely. Opera isn't compatible with Microsoft's business strategy since it implements web standards.

Everyone please remember that IE/Mac is a very different browser than IE/Win, and back in 1999/2000 it was one of the most standards-compliant browsers around.

According to The Web Standards Project it helped to start the "CSS layout revolution".

Everyone please remember that IE/Mac is a very different browser than IE/Win, and back in 1999/2000 it was one of the most standards-compliant browsers around.

According to The Web Standards Project it helped to start the "CSS layout revolution".

Am I being naughty if I'm serving XHTML 1.1 with application/xhtml+xml only to browsers that support it?

Yes.

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

If you ever decide to go back to Opera, you should know that it's now free (as in beer) and has no registration, and is not ad-supported anymore. And they're getting closer to releasing version 9, which apparently does quite well on the Acid2 Test.

That being said, the Acid 2 test isn't really about what CSS features the browser supports, it's about how the browser handles poorly formed code.

This is a common misconception. Somebody on Slashdot pointed out that Acid2 wasn't valid, and this myth sprang up and has been propogated by people who don't know any better.

Acid2 tests a dozen or so different areas of conformance to various specifications. Only one of those is related to error handling, and it's a minor part at that. Anybody who has read the accompanying guide knows this. It's very clear. Read the guide (scroll down to "What are we testing?") if you don't believe me.

So please, don't be clueless and spread the myth that Acid2 is all about error handling. It's not true, yet there's always somebody keen to point it out when it's mentioned on Slashdot.

IE7 is also not slated to pass at RTM, although the developers claim it will soon afterwards.

Acid2 is overrated, in any case. If you actually read the documentation on Acid2, it's a list of wants from web designers. A good target, but compared with security an usability is not on the top of the list for needs in the browsers of the future.

How does FF1.5 render the ACID2 test?

Does anyone know why Safari passes, but no other browsers? (Perhaps the Acid just love Apple?)

Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.

At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.

It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.

The Web Standards Project took it upon themselves to create a "pseudo-certification" of sorts with their Acid Test. Word of mouth elevated the test's standing as a legitimate benchmark for browser compliance.

Browser makers responded in various ways. Opera and Microsoft have both essentially dismissed the Acid2 test as unnecessary, preferring instead to focus on their own priorities. Mozilla has been come pretty close to passing the test all along, but I believe that they give some thought to eventually passing it perfectly. Apple got right on the ball with their Safari browser, and within a year they released a version that passes the Acid2 test.

So your idea is sound. In this case, not everyone got on board, but the fact that even one major browser maker made passing the test a goal means it was useful. If a stronger, more official certification were offered, it might even get the other players to participate. Unfortunately, the most likely source for a certification like this would be Microsoft, and who wants to match their standards?

with the web standards. Does your browser comply? http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

Contrary to what's announced in the previous post, Safari was not the first browser to be Acid2-compatible. The mac-only iCab beated it from more than three months.

This is incorrect. Contrary to your post, "perennial Mac browser also-ran iCab has edged out Linux browsing heavyweight Konqueror for second place in the Acid2 stakes." link

Since the article does not discuss this, does anyone know how well these browsers do on the Acid2 Test. I remember Slashdot reporting on Safari and Konqueror passing the test. Were those changes ever rolled out into the latest versions of those browsers?

In the markup, the row is represented by a p element which is fixed to the window rather than the scrollable canvas. If the Acid2 page is scrolled, the scalp will stay fixed in place, becoming unstuck from the rest of the face, which will scroll.

It also passes the International Color Consortium ICC version 4 test again, which also worked on Safari 1.3. Prior to Safari 2.0.2, Safari 2.x only passed ICC version 2 test.

Javascript speed seems a hair faster and gives Opera a good run.

Javascript benchmark

Mac Mini 1.25 GHz w/ 512MB RAM
OS___________Version _______Trial 1_________Trial 2
Mac OSX 10.3.8 Safari v1.2.4___ 85.28 seconds___86.28 seconds
Mac OSX 10.3.9 Safari v1.3____ 10.97 seconds___10.39 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.0 Safari v2.0____ 09.48 seconds___09.30 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Safari v2.0.1___ 09.41 seconds___09.07 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Safari v2.0.2___ 08.41 seconds___08.54 seconds

iMac G5 1.8 GHz w/1GB RAM
OS___________Version _________________Trial 1_________Trial 2
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Opera 8.5__________ 07.45 seconds___07.39 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Safari 2.0.2_________ 08.51 seconds___08.79 seconds

Mac OSX 10.4.2 Opera 8.5__________ 07.31 seconds___07.88 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Safari 2.0.1_________ 09.02 seconds___09.12 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Camino 0.8.4_______ 15.13 seconds___15.33 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Firefox 1.0.7________ 21.04 seconds___20.84 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Internet Explorer 5.2.3 40.87 seconds___36.94 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Mozilla 1.7.12_______ 44.11 seconds___43.54 seconds

Mail.app 2.0.5 fixes the annoying problem with replicating new messages twice or thrice for IMAP email.

Get Info and Finder now shows Architecture the application binary runs on. Guess this will help with the transition to x86 to identify which applications are PowerPC only or Universal. I assume people aren't going to be writing exclusively for Intel X86 Mac OS X applications for a long time.

The bad:

Quartz 2D Extreme is still not part of Tiger. Hopefully it will make it in Leopard.

"Disables Quartz 2D Extreme--Quartz 2D Extreme is not a supported feature in Tiger, and re-enabling it may lead to video redraw issues or kernel panics."

It was impressive to see that Safari can now pass the acid2 test. . . Now it is the most standards compliant browser:
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

I'm rooting for firefox to catch up -- it is usually the heavyweight in this area but it has been passed up.

This is strange. I have iScroll2 and if I go to http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html directly I can't scroll, but if I follow the link to it from http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/ I can scroll and things break. Note that this before taking the test, if I take the test if works as expected.

This is strange. I have iScroll2 and if I go to http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html directly I can't scroll, but if I follow the link to it from http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/ I can scroll and things break. Note that this before taking the test, if I take the test if works as expected.

By visiting the ACID2 test and then scrolling downward in Safari using my Apple Mighty Mouse I'm able to break the ACID2 test rendering. Here is a screenshot of it. The face breaks and the better part of it scrolls across the page. I don't think this is the expected behavior, but I guess I may be wrong?

...the way they have supported HTML.

Someone who resorts to personal insults usually doesn't know what they are talking about. Can you name all of the browsers out there that fully support CSS 2.1? Guess what: There are none. You can not download today a browser that passes the Acid 2 test. Until browsers support the standards, people can't just code to the standards and expect their page to work in a standards-complient browser.

Yes, a page that looks good in Firefox will usually work in Safari. Usually. But Opera doesn't support some things that Firefox and Safari support. Such as the "opacity" tag.

About Macintosh browsers, there is a lot of cruft there that I can't test my pages to, such as iCab, older versions of OmniWeb, and, yes, Cyberdog. I really with iCab had no CSS support whatsoever so a page rendered in iCab looks like the page in Dillo or another non-CSS browser.

You don't know it was a standard feature.

You're right, he may or may not be talking about a standard CSS feature, but it's not as if there's no room for improvement in Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but there are still improvements to be made in terms of CSS rendering.

The thing is, Microsoft isn't just giving standards compliance lip service. They're actually doing it. Again, we won't see this until beta 2 of IE, but they've said on the IE blog that a ton of that work has already been done. Lying about it would just make matters worse, so I see no reason to disbelieve them on this.

Have you read this?

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx

Have you read this?

http://webstandards.org/press/releases/archive/200 5/07/05/

I think Microsoft has finally realized just how behind the 8 ball they are, and realize they need to shore up their standards support to compete. So yes, it *IS* in their best interest to be standards compliant these days.

Maybe Microsoft is just pulling some collosal wool over many peoples (including those in the standards industry) eyes, but I don't think so.

Microsoft has turned 180 degrees on a dime before, and while they're much larger today than the last time, they seem to be taking it very seriously.

Needs some more work to pass the Acid2 test

Go there and let them know you want web standards compliance.

So how about IE not supporting web standards (example)? IE detracts from the web as a whole because designers are unable to implement useful features because they have to accomidate all the IE users and their browser that doesn't know its ass from its face when dealing with css.

The statistics are provided by NetApplications.com. Their numbers come from aggregating browser stats from all sites using their service -- hardly a statistically-valid sample of the web audience. Read more about it here.

This is just plain FUD, or some kind of commercial service provider has found a cheap and easy way too get a lot of publicity. Not only is the number so low that it is within the error margin of their results, furthermore, there are other sources which even say that Firefox' market share has risen 2% in the same period.

See also http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_08.h tml#a000545

Nothing to see here people, move along!

These guys see it differently

Their view was that sampling errors were not discussed, and this affects the reliability of the numbers.

Yeah, but you know what? There aren't thousands of fanboys pointing this out whenever these statistics are used to show an increase in Firefox use, are there? These statistics aren't ridiculed by the Web Standards Project then, are they?

I'm a Firefox user and I'm fairly happy with it, honestly. But it really gets on my nerves when such a double-standard is applied just because Firefox is the current media darling. Web statistics are nonsense, pure and simple. You can get just as accurate numbers by guessing.

If you want to know what the browser market share is, you can't do it by measuring traffic. Phone people up, conduct surveys, whatever you'd normally do to determine what offline software people use. Don't bother with web statistics as they are inherently unreliable.

• When was the last time you checked your ISP's DNS entry for your banking sites static content (scripts) was pointing to the right server?

  Any financial services company should have appropriate IT security strategies in place, as otherwise they'll be in an awful lot of trouble with the regulatory bodies. Ensuring the integrity of DNS would be one of the issues addressed. You might as well ask, "When was the last time you checked the DLL versions for your desktop banking application?" If the bank doesn't ensure proper security, no application on whatever platform is safe.

• When was the last time you had to upgrade your browser because of a javascript bug?

  Having worked as a web applications developer since 1996, I can state with absolute confidence that the last time I had to upgrade because of a bug in a JavaScript engine was in late 1999, when an obscure issue to do with the scope of JS for-loops was fixed in a new version of Windows Script. That didn't involve upgrading IE, just the script engine DLLs, which are an operating system component on Windows. I've never found any reason since that occasion to upgrade a browser or part thereof for the purposes of scripting; if the browser doesn't support the required functionality, my web apps will silently fall back to a no-script-required mode of operation.

  If I find a web app which is so badly-written as to be unusable in current browsers, I notify those responsible, often giving them the bug fix (which is usually a no-brainer). To blame the technology for the fact that many developers are too lazy or incompetent to test their code isn't really a viable position.

• When was the last time you audited a web app for accessability?

  Last Friday. And you?

  Furthermore, when was the last time you reviewed a desktop app for accessibility? I have a partially-sighted (legally blind) friend who regularly gets pulled up short by issues in desktop apps; for example, there is no way to resize the text in the location bar on any version of Internet Explorer, as it ignores the OS settings. He also get caught by badly-written web apps. The issue for him isn't web apps, it's apps that don't work properly, whatever the platform.

  Accessibility is something the whole industry needs to get more serious about, but restricting your question to web apps is mere casuistry. At least the Web Standards Project is serious about improving accessibility for the web generally, and has set up the Accessibility Task Force to investigate, define and promote best practice in this area. Do desktop app vendors have a similar body?

Even webstandards.org doesn't seem to agree with him. This here news item on that site is pretty unambiguously cheerful about the things IE7 *is* fixing. As a web developer, I am too.

So no, I won't stop using Firefox when IE7 comes out. But I damn well will develop for IE7. I may just forget to code for all those earlier versions.

I get that too. Apparently it's supposed to look like this:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml

Here's the Acid2 test page:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

(Safari 1.3)

I get that too. Apparently it's supposed to look like this:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml

Here's the Acid2 test page:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

(Safari 1.3)

I'm sure many have seen this already... a quick way to show how much of the CSS spec is supported by your browser.

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

I'd be interested to know how IE7 fairs, IE6's rendering is horrendous.

It seems that a series of tests that exercise various features and allow for a score to be generated would be more more ideal. This is similar to how one would develop unit tests for business objects in a professional development environment. Saying that "[browser X] passes 90% of the CSS unit tests" would be much more descripting then saying "[browser X] fails the acid test".

Uh... I think i broke my firefox because it's not rendering the Acid2 Test correctly either? http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

visit http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#to p The image in the article is the reference image.

AFAIK, the only two currently shipping browsers that pass are Konqueror and, believe it or not, iCab 3.0 beta (iCab is an obscure Mac browser that had horrible CSS support in versions 1.x-2.x. It now has excellent standards support, and is by far the most compliant browser for Mac OS 8.5-9.x. It also runs on OS X, obviously).

Safari CVS passes the test, but no official releases do. Mozilla is dragging their feet somewhat because of their release schedule, and because they are fixing security issues first (as I understand it, anyway... I could be off-base here). Opera is committed to passing it, but does not pass yet. See the Web Standards Project blog at http://www.webstandards.org/ for more details.