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Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test
naylor83 writes "Four weeks ago, Opera's CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they're no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people's."
is an analysis of what failed with each browser (especially Firefox.) None of the links told us why the browser failed to render the smiley face or what the WSP did to obfuscate the code. Any takers?
It was known before the test was published that no browser would get it right. That's the whole point!
The reason for having this is to expose bugs in current implementations. Internet Explorer is the obvious retard, implementing about 50% of CSS 2.1, but that doesn't mean that the other browsers can just slack off at 95%. That's not what the W3C is about, it's not what WASP is about, and it's not what this acid test is about.
I don't think the standard's broken persay, I just believe that programmers haven't yet implemented it completely/correctly. CSS2 is a very difficult standard to implement simply because it encompasses so much not only in code length, but in what it actually does. That being said, CSS2 is really ahead of its time (as is CSS3), but as the competition for the better browser roars up, you can bet your bottom dollar that these standards will be the key issues everyone is looking at.
I really think it's going to be a tough race verses Firefox and Internet Explorer; Microsoft has more coders out there to throw at Internet Explorer, whereas Firefox already has industry leading stamina and good developmental practices, even if some of them are contraversial (disabling itf domains support, for example). Either way, the browsers will get better, and eventually will be able to render that page without any issue, but it'll just take time.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
In order for something to qualify as FUD, it has to be untrue.
Given that Microsoft itself does not pretend that IE has a complete CSS 2.1 implementation, it cannot be FUD to state that it is obvious that IE will do worse on a test of CSS 2.1 than other browsers which do claim to implement that particular standard.
Note also that many people consider CSS 2 to be overcomplicated and not very useful in practice. It is therefore not necessarily even a bad thing for a browser to fail this test - arguably, a browser that passed it would be bloated, as it would implement all sorts of things that are not necessary to view 99.99% of web pages. So to say that IE fails the test badly is not only not FUD - it isn't even (necessarily) a criticism!
Any chance you could train your knees not to jerk so quickly, please?
There's no degree of broken.
Yes, there is. If Firefox gets, say, 90% of the CSS rules correct, and Internet Explorer gets, say, 40% of the CSS rules correct, that's significant.
If FireFox was more disappointing, it wouldn't ahve been mentioned at all.
Huh? Firefox made the headline as failing the test. Internet Explorer didn't. And you consider that to be FUD against Microsoft?
Right now I am looking at a handy CSS reference chart saying which browser supports what, and the fact is, one third to half of the standard is entirely un-implemented by Mozilla, Opera and IE.
If a CSS standard falls on browser designers to implement, and no one implements it, was it really "the standard?"
IE6 implement far less of the CSS2 spec than any other browser - that's a fact. Hence the "obviously".
At the end of the day, no it's not. Broken is broken.
In a way I agree - I think implementing CSS2 to its full extent would be more than twice as good as implementing half of it.
At the same time I think implementing 80% is better than implementing 35%.
Of course the other problem is companies differ on their interpretation of the CSS2 spec, because in places the spec itself is vague.
Umm take the actual test this time, rather than looking at the reference image.
I tried it on the pretty much the same machine as you (just plain Server vs Adv Server though), and it was the same hideous red mess shown in the IE screenshot.
This test also helps with that. In the case that differing renderings are found that are both legitimate readings of the specification, then the wording in the specification can be tightened up. Consider this a test not only of web browsers, but the CSS specifications themselves.
The real lessons to be learnt from this seem to be getting lost here. If we put aside the MS vs Moz, FUD vs non-FUD and not-as-broken vs either broken or not debates we can see that web designers should have something to look forward to in the (near?) future.
Finally, here is something that could actually give the browser developers something to aim for and help to pull together the standardisation of modern CSS rendering. From how that smiley face is supposed to look I'm already quite excited about what we'll be able to do once all of the browsers are up to scratch.
Now all we need is for the browser developers to take note of this, use it as a learning tool and a target to aim for and give the web design/development community a hell of a lot less stuff to debate about.
It could happen...
But of course, in addition to this they shouldn't let the acid2 test be a final goal and then just sit back and let themselves get rusty. Personally i'd like to see a publicly available acid test for all the new versions/revisions of CSS standards so that Joe Home User can more easily choose which browser to use. An acidN test once every 8 years?
This is the fast moving world of technology, don't you know.
So? That's a good thing. I prefer to know up front where someone's bias lies. Everyone has one and when you try to hide it you have no way of knowing where it might creep it. Just be honest about it and accept it. I can go read an MSDN journal for an IE-biased opinion.
> Face it. We dropped the ball
These people at the W3C dropped an incomplete spec out of their ivory tower with incoherent documentation, no functioning reference implementation, and no test suite, and we dropped the ball?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
"Ask anybody who has to hop to IE to visit certain sites."
Well, if you get to a site where a CSS2 feature breaks in Opera or Firefox, switching to IE isn't going to do you a load of goodAs Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer; they should be encouraged to do so, so that Internet Explorer would continue to evolve.
And just who could afford to do this? If you run a commercial web site, do you want most of your customers to see a page that looks like crap, with a footnote at the bottom saying "We know your page looks like crap, but it's Microsoft's fault, and we hope they will have it fixed within the next two years"?
What will happen is that your customers will go away until it gets fixed. Who loses? Microsoft? or you? Will Microsoft lose any sleep over the fact that you are losing customers? Very unlikely.
Well, okay, but if I had a few pages of c++ code and I said that no compiler could run it, I'd be blaming my code rather than the compilers, if you know what I mean.
If your C++ program adheres to the ANSI C++ language specification, and the compilers all get it wrong, then it's the compilers' problems, not yours.
On a more practical note, it is probably unwise to write correct code that trips up bugs in every compiler on the market, but if you are creating a compiler-validation test suite, that's exactly what you want to do.