Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test

Rytis writes "Opera has just become the second browser after Safari to be able to pass completely the famous ACID2 test. Mark Wilton-Jones is running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID tests. Of course, it includes a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the nice happy face saying "Hello world!"."

Comments

Tweaked

[Stellian]

What's more interesting, will it pass ACID3? It's easy to tweak the engine untill it passes a single known test. Historicaly, Opera had (and still has?) problems with both JavaScript and CSS. I must admit though, that the rendering in Opera 8 (pre ACID2) is much better than Mozilla's.

Re:Tweaked

[FyRE666]

Opera 9 still displays visual artifacts when using DHTML/DOM Scripting/(whatever people are calling it this week). I recently coded up a quick demo for a bigger project - the demo allowed an image to be uploaded, resized and moved about using Javascript, then "stamped out" by using js+php. I only tested Opera out of interest as It's always been pretty flaky with Javascript/CSS. Moving images with the mouse was fine, but resizing (in the app, this was done by grabbing a corner and moving it) resulted in pixel trails which looked kind of cool, but were not supposed to be there. The "fix", was to continually change the z-index of the image as it was being resized, causing Opera to refresh the canvas.

The reason Opera is "victimised" by older scripts is due to the ridiculous decision of that company to add code stubs for functions it did not actually support (I remember when it had document.getElementById(), which always returned null - that's why many scripts look for the Opera string, and block it).

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[Bralkein]

Well, since KHTML and KJS (I think?) were ported over to Mac OS in the first place in order to create Safari, which then allowed the Apple devs to create the patches that allowed it to pass Acid2, patches which could not then be easily applied back to KHTML and KJS because the code sometimes didn't meet KDE's standards or because the patches were sometimes not supplied in a format that they could easily work with, maybe the KDE devs put in more effort overall :-P

But seriously, who gives a shit who came first, second or whatever; I think the important thing is that browser developers are obviously making an effort to ensure stricter standards compliance. I assume someone must be working on this for Firefox, so does anybody know when we can expect to see Firefox pass Acid2 as well?

Re:Konqueror passed 2nd

[jZnat]

I don't know, but Konqueror does indeed appear to pass the Acid2 test. The only problem I can see is this odd scrolling bug, but that probably isn't supposed to be able to scroll anyhow.

Safari hates malformed pages

[kherr]

Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.

There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?

A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.

That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.

Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can opera handle third party cookies properly yet? A little more important than styles rendering in my opinion.

Re:Yeah, but...

[Jugalator]

Can you be more specific what's not handled correctly? I can block third party cookies, I can manually delete third party cookies, and I can allow them, and the cookie settings seem to reflect they're not added when they should, and respected when they're allowed. If you're talking about a specific bug here, you must be much more clear about what you're talking about.

Safari, iCab, and Konqueror aren't for Windows

[tepples]

According to WaSP (the people who wrote the Acid2 test), [Browser not for Microsoft Windows] passed first, followed by [a second browser not for Microsoft Windows] and [a third browser not for Microsoft Windows]. [...] That makes Opera the 4th browser to render Acid2 correctly.

It also makes Opera the first publicly available web browser that renders the Acid2 page correctly under the Microsoft Windows operating system. This is important if you don't want to have to re-buy your PC (in switching to Mac OS X, which runs only on Apple hardware) or your peripherals (in switching to Linux, where SANE still doesn't support my flatbed scanner). Or is Konqueror for Cygwin/X considered stable yet?

Re:This does NOT pass Acid 2

[wheany]

Animated gif illustrating the rollover effect.

Re:WebKit matters, not the Safari frontend

[JulesLt]

Presumably that means that other WebKit based software should also pass - the latest build of Shira looks like it does.

Not tested any others but I'm sure Xylescope, TextMate and OmniBrowser all use WebKit too.