IE 5.5 Beats IE6 and IE7 On Acid 3

Steven Noonan sends us to a page where he is collecting and updating results for various browsers on the newly released Acid 3 test. No browser yet scores 100 on this test. (We discussed Acid 3 when it came out.) He writes, "It's not surprising that Internet Explorer is losing to every other modern browser, but how did IE 5.5 beat IE 6.0 and 7.0?" All of the IE versions score below 20 on Acid 3.

Comments

Re:IE8 Beta 1?

[MightyYar]

Why has there been no discussion on Slashdot of IE 8 beta 1? Like, say, a front-page story from four days ago? :)

It even has your same link right in the summary...

Re:And older firefox versions do better too

[bunratty]

Actually, according to multiple sources, Firefox 2.0.0.12 score 50%, lower than Firefox 3 builds. No, the quality of Firefox is not decreasing.

Re:IE8 Beta 1?

[Bogtha]

It is a problem, but it's not the hard-coding people seem to think it is. The problem is not that Internet Explorer 8 is checking for www.webstandards.org, the problem is that the mirrors that are failing are changing the test in a way that is important to Internet Explorer. Part of the test refers to a page that intentionally doesn't exist in order to check a fallback option. The trouble is that this page is referred to with an absolute URL, which means that when you simply copy the test to another host, it becomes a cross-domain issue.

Ian's pointing out that it's still a failure so it should be subject to the same fallback, which is correct, but the important point is that it's failing to load in a different way to how it would on the www.webstandards.org host because the mirrors didn't take the cross-domain issue into account. I expect the final version of Internet Explorer 8 to correct this problem, but it's not at all a case of Microsoft attempting to "cheat", just an unfortunate coincidence.

Re:And older firefox versions do better too

[neunon]

I don't know how, but I messed up when making the table. I reconfirmed the results with the ones I had written down and realized the Firefox 2.0.0.12 Mac OS X entry was incorrect. I've corrected the error. The actual value is 52%. So 3.0b3 is actually doing better than the current release. Sorry about that error. - Steven

Re:IE8 Beta 1?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why is this modded down to -1? I'm running IE8b1 right now and yes, it runs Acid2 completely.

It was probably modded down because we've already had this discussion in three different articles over the last week. IE8 beta passes the Acid 2 test only when run on webstandards.org, but fails if you run it on almost any mirror. The discussion further continued with speculation that MS had hardcoded a workaround specifically for the test and was "cheating". This turned out to be untrue and the reason was that webstandards.org references a page that exists incorrectly but the mirrors reference a page that doesn't exist. Both cases should be handled, but IE8 beta fails on the latter.

Probably people were modding the post down because it was factually incorrect. A better way to deal with the problem is probably to post a factual response, but several people have done so and those posts have not been modded high enough so that the facts are more easily read than the misleading evidence presented in the post you are asking about. Either that or a dozen people with mod points just groaned and thought, "do we have to go through all this again?"

Some insight regarding the Acid 3 Test

[trixy_1086]

I found this information regarding the Acid 3 test on a Webkit developer's site (http://webkit.org/blog/158/the-acid-3-test/) As much as I hate to debunk any article bashing IE, here is the information from the article:

If you run Acid 3 on the shipping versions of current browsers (Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera 9, IE7), you'll see that they all score quite low. For example Safari 3 scores a 39/100. This percentage score is a bit misleading however. The situation with all four browser engines really isn't that bad. You can think of the Acid 3 test as consisting of 100 individual test suites. In order for a browser engine to claim one of these precious 100 points, it has to pass a whole battery of tests around a specific standard. In other words it's like the browser is being asked to take 100 separate exams and score an A+ on each test in order to get any credit at all. The reality is that all of the browsers are doing much better than their scores would have you believe, since the engines are often passing a majority of the subtests and experiencing minor failures that cost them the point for that section.