Slashdot Mirror
Opera Lays Down Acid2 Challenge
sebFlyte writes "The CTO of Opera has proposed a new version of the acid test for browser compatibility, and has challenged Microsoft to make IE7 a browser worth having that will do the Web good. He's asked to help from Web designers the world over to build a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to. "
*cough* Firefox
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Has anyone (even Opera) managed to create a browser that does what all the web designers want it to do? Does the web designer community have a consensus of what they want the browsers to do?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You can usually remove the word "acid" from "acid test" without doing any harm.
Will IE 7 have 'Electric Kool-Aid' tags?
The coolest voice ever.
It'd be nice if there were reference pages made by the standards committees, so a browser could be simply deemed compliant or not.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
MS has never shown the initiative to make things compliant why should any developers waste precious time coding a page for MS to balk at when there are other browsers out there? Firefox is slowly but surely gaining market share. I say Good Riddance to IE and make room for the new guys. Why HELP MS strenthen their hold?
Microsoft's IE7 developers allow themselves a chuckle and think, "Ha! We've been on acid for decades."
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
Standards compliance is for companies that don't have 90% or more of a market.
Next!
This is brilliant!! Appear to be helpful, but really just point out shortcomings and bugs in your competitor's product, all the while gaining visibility and recognition in the community. I really must remember to do this sometime.
Load even more spyware!!!
Err, oh. I guess that that was not a valid choice.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I think the number of people who care about IE are just under 90% of the browser market, and anyone who might fix their computer (another 6-7%).
So maybe a few people.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Is anybody actually caring about IE at this point?
Why would anyone care about the experience of 90% (or whatever) of the site's users?
Microsoft would more than likely simply ignore the challenge completely. What do they have to gain (at this point) from actually producing a standards-compliant browser?
Now, perhaps if FireFox continues to chew up the percentages of web browser usage, they might try it for PR purposes, but that's hardly an issue at the moment. Microsoft is more of an in-the-moment company (unless you're speaking of up-and-coming products, where they announce competing programs years before they actually plan to implement the changes).
As opposed to a real name like ScentClone! Thank god we can trust you.
I humbly submit my idea for building a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to.
Get Firefox!
If it can properly render that link, I'll be satisfied.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Aren't there test suites that test the conformance of an implementation to all aspects of CSS2 standard already? And if not, why not?
Correct. However, Opera is falling behind in mindshare now that FireFox has all the buzz. So the best thing for Opera to do is to put up a standards challenge to Microsoft.
That accomplishes two things: (1) some free PR for Opera, and (2) if anyone really follows through with it, it is far easier for Opera to adapt to the results than Microsoft. Opera has only a miniscule installed base that it needs to stay compatible with.
And let's not be smug about everyone but Microsoft following standards. The company I used to work for had a file-upload javascript that worked with Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and IE, but it didn't work with Safari and we had to specially recode the script just to accomodate that Safari quirk.
It would be nice if every page rendered the same way on every browser, but let's be real. There will still be millions and millions of people who are slow to upgrade. Even if the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE join hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, you're still going to have to test your sites on Netscape 4.7, IE 5, etc. or you're going to have issues with the 30-40% of the market who hasn't upgraded yet.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Open Source geeks challenged M$ to make windows the most secure OS.
US challenged China to be most democratic country
blah blah
Mod me down as troll, but what makes anyone think M$ cares about a challenge from a competitor?!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
Slashdot produces some of the worst html code available, and it doesn't produce the same exact code EVERY time. Some days it offers spans, some days tables missing end tags, it's just random garbarge. How do you expect ANY browser to render code the same, EVERYTIME? God. I fed a troll... *shaking head*
Or the malicious ones who miscode their site to intentionally over-support a browser.
I support Hakon, but I think he's aiming at the wrong spot.
Caveat: I have used (and liked) Opera since version 3 or so. I am have used (and hated) IE since version 2 or so. I am hardly unbiased.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
it's not over till the fat browser sinks, eh?
haha, I kill me... *snicker*
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
with the way MS products behave, it's obvious they've had acid before!
We need them to learn to read specs!
AC comments get piped to
FWIW last time I checked Opera was pretty much tied with Firefox for being standards complaint. Among browsers that normal human use that's saying a lot.
Based on that I don't see what's laughable.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Most people are not web designers.
Most people are not familiar with the nuances of CSS2.
Most people are not aware of the various published spec's from W3.
Most people are users.
Most users use IE.
Most people percieve "what the web can do" to be what they've experienced as "what IE can do."
Most people don't know what they're missing.
"What Microsoft provides" is already the de facto standard for the web. And most designers are resigned to living with this--nobody puts out CSS2 elements that IE does NOT support on production pages.
There's zero pressure on Microsoft for standards compliance. Most people can barely comprehend the technical nuance of what the weberati say is "noncompliant," let alone be up in arms about it.
Actually they make quite a bit of money selling Opera. It's used a lot as an embedded app in cell phones, PDAs and such. As I understand it, Opera runs on more devices than any other browser. They also are more than willing to make custom versions for just about any platform or purpose.
Any money they make from people sitting in front of desktops is just bonus.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
This is not meant to be an attack on IE. If reasonable assumptions can be made about what the code should do, even when coded incorrectly, then it's great that IE does this. I'm not sure of any specific examples, but when I first started writing web pages (years ago), I remember that Netscape would cough on some pages that IE rendered well. Invariably, the problem was that I had left off some terminating tags, and IE correctly figured out my intentions.
Three caveats:
First, having Netscape scold me allowed me to fix my code. IMHO, a better way to do this, however, would be to have an option called "pedantic" that would insist on matching tags (where appropriate). This might exist now, and if so, that's great.
Second, trying to "guess" what was intended is rife with problems. Anyone who has used MS Word for long enough knows what I mean.
Finally, I currently use FireFox the vast majority of the time. I do not know if any of what I said is still true.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
http://validator.w3.org
Just a thought (many dead bodies spinning in graves), what if IE7 is the Tit, the Jones, the Cake, the next best thing to drugs, and secure? Will it be a sign of the apocalypse?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...all links posted on slashdot go directly to Roland's webpage.
I'll be more impressed by something Opera says about compatibility when they fix their own issues--particularly their shoddy XMLHTTPRequest implementation.
Even though it sounds a little tinfoil-hattish, the fact that a non-standards compliant web browser dominates the market might have a whole heck of a lot to do with all those web pages that don't follow standards, and rather choose to be compatible with IE.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I'd like to submit someone elses example page of the horrific way IE6 handles CSS2:
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspira l/demo.html
It not only describes what goes wrong, but why, how and where.
Oh: Eric: if you're reading this: Thanks! :)
Look at this detailed analysis of how IE, Opera and Mizilla render CSS. Note that Opera and IE were both wrong at first, but Opera has adopted Mozilla's convention.
This clearly demonstrates that the "browser war" is really a one(IE)-on-one(Firefox) battle with Opera and others simply choosing which side to mimic.
First off, Opera's still innovating. Who has voice? Not Firefox, that's for sure... Who has small screen rendering? Not MiniMo (yet, anyway)...
And, I've heard Opera's biggest moneymaker is NOT the desktop, where one can pay $0 and get text ads instead. It's mobile, where they're the only good game in town on some OSes (and they're working on Windows Smartphone - Pocket PC and Palm will be the only major OSes lacking Opera).
Microsoft is constantly competing with itself, not others. It needs people to buy the latest versions of its OS and applications (office) to keep revenues coming in.
:)
As a result, it chooses to do things like release the XP2 firewall but not offer it for win2k - to push people towards newer versions, despite win2k being in mainstream support.
Recently, they've been forced by the HUGE number of corporate customers to offer WinFS as an option for XP as well as future versions of the OS. Why? Because corporate customers don't run bleeding edge software.
So what they need is a huge, wonderful carrot that will lead customers to the latest version. We arent talking about Dear Old Aunt Sally - she doesn't buy new versions of OS's. She buys a computer, and it comes with it.
We are talking about corporate customers. They didn't buy the concept that WinFS couldn't work on XP, but Microsoft has been shouting (even swearing in court) that the browser is part of the OS.
As a result, MS could very easily make IE7 only available on longhorn. As such, it's an opportunity for them to make it a selling point - a carrot.
To make the carrot more attractive, they need to make it do as many things RIGHT as possible. If IE7 truly supported css2, png transparency, javascript, and so on, WEBDESIGNERS would start drawing the line at older versions of IE - doing Microsoft's selling for them!
Businesses, portals, and the list goes on - anywhere that wants to make a truly compelling site without a million css box model hacks would start suggesting users use IE7, and before long, REQUIRING IE7.
Microsoft has every reason in the world to kick major standards-ass with IE7, but unfortunately, they have a track record of not doing it.
Here's hoping that their business savy is more powerful than their laziness.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
XMLHTTPRequest is not specified in any standard. It's more Microsoft extension nonsense which Mozilla foolishly embraced. Then again, the Mozilla guys tend to make poor decisions (hello IDN!)
A good example would be something along the lines of this (a response from an actual discussion I took part in, the funny thing was I wasn't trying to tell anyone anything about the W3C or the importance of standards, I just asked a question about a script that was acting strange in Firefox, my current platform of choice): Admittedly this is an extreme example, but I believe it is representative of a broader belief that might makes right. Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Safari are still a relatively small ripple and there are some stodgy people out there who at best, simply don't care if their code works on a minority browser.
Until it hits their pocket-books thats not going to change. The pressure needs to be put on businesses so that when say Bank AAA gets a site built that can't/doesn't support your browser (because of non-standard code created by people either too stubborn or too lazy to spend the extra 3 seconds to create/read about browser-friendly code) they hear about it. Maybe even lose some customers.
Then our friendly web-developer can come back and learn how to fix his/her code. If that happens enough they'll get tired of doing it the old way and maybe play nice from the get-go.
FTR, the code we were discussing in the the above quoted passaged did get fixed, by me and I have about 2 weeks of javascript programming under my belt (and if your wondering about the preceding conversation, no, I wasn't impolite or anything like that, I'm too old to pull that kind of crap).
Quack, quack.
Maybe Slashdot should just put it on the front page.t ension.html
http://hardgrok.org/blog/item/slashfix-firefox-ex
This is a firefox extension that fixes the strange rendering that Slashdot's broken html creates.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In short, no.
Even if someone makes a browser that does everything designers AND developers want it to, it still won't do any good to those of us stuck supporting browsers that DON'T do all of it. The entire world is unlikely to switch instantly to the new wonder browser, leaving us to support legacy products.
Where I work our top tier browser/OS matrix is:
Win 98 - XP; IE5>, Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
Linux; Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
Mac OSX; Safari, IE 5.3>, Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
This is a nightmare to build, even worse to QA. Opera, ironically enough, is not in our top tier BECAUSE it rendered pages differently enough from the other browsers- even though we were authoring XHTML 1.0 trans and CSS2 compliant- that it got shunted to a lower tier of support.
If you pick any of those, IE would be the worst example, you can get different implementations between versions of how a page is supposed to render.
I think this is why a large portion of the pages on the Web are authored they way they are- the broadest reach for the narrowest buck.
Mac isn't the only brand with a cult. Build the world's best browser and you'll still have legions of people SWEARING that their choice in browser is the best, and pages that look like shit in it are due to the page not being written correctly rather than the browser's render engine using its own interpretation of WHAT the page is SUPPOSED to look like
On the cynical side, I think a browser that did everything that Web designers wanted might come out something like Homer's car.
Or Opera.
R(k)
There is none.
I'm glad they made that "foolish" decision, because without XMLHTTPRequest you have no such thing as responsive web apps, no gmail, no google maps, etc.
This is not +4, Insightful, because the OP is correct. Amongst others, I work for BBDO, TBWA, Publicis and RSCG, and none of those care much for IE, because if you have designers who understand the medium, it's easy to build nice (==compliant) XHTML/CSS which renders just fine everywhere. Most problems derive from graphics-laden sites sketched up in Photoshop (or even worse, XPress or Freehand) by aging print designers which require nonsensical pixel-perfect rendering and are demanded to be built "exactly like the layout!". Broken design, broken result.
I might add that of course there are many huge players in the field who still travel the 'optimized for IE' road and build shitty stuff which just renders in one or two versions of IE (rendering of CSS changed severely in some areas between IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0). But those who understand what they do, produce good quality. The IE only pages are already disappearing, and actually my perspective on this is not that it happens because every new IE release introduces more incompatibilities with old versions and people are fed up with kludging up their HTML when they can just rebuild it and have it work everywhere in half the time which is required for debugging all those stupid side effects. Look at Google Maps as an example. Doesn't look very 'optimized for IE' to me.
(I only talk about professional web design. I refuse to discuss the HTML practices of hobbyists, they'll build broken pages until browsers refuse to display them completely (won't happen), and frankly shouldn't be bothered with such discussions. Let them play with it, maybe some of them get enough out of it to learn how to do it the right way later.)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Perhaps you mean ad nominum attacks?
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
However, the CSS and XHTML specs on the W3C site are difficult to understand and therefore not all that useful when you're trying to debug a rendering problem. In addition, which browsers support searching the specs for, say, all rules that contribute to this border?
edxwelch's comment, take 3: There is a standard available (XForms), but no one has yet deployed it.