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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.
If you can't own the internet, this is the next best thing.
This space available.
No one else finds it odd that only a few browsers scored over 60%... What good is a standard that no one adheres to?
Makes it seem more like a suggestion...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
To put it all into perspective how bad IE 8.0 is when it comes to web standards I tested a two year old install of Konqueror (KDE 3.4) and it gets a score of 51%. The best IE 8.0 can do is 17%.
a beta version having worse performance than a production version isn't exactly the same as an ancient, no longer supported version having better performance than the current production version.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
I would have to say that it is that you don't get it. No one is so arrogant as to think that they can sit down and design the perfect web. As with virtually all of human achievement, we expect that there will be continual advancement, and hopefully we will never hit a wall. The Acid tests are road marks on the advancement of web browsers. The Acid tests are for the purpose of seeing just how compatible the browsers are. Scores of 0% and 100% are both useless. So, you make a test that is not so hard that no one can get even 1%, and that are not so easy that everyone gets 100%.
Well, the browsers are getting to that 100% point. Acid2 was not built to check 100% compliance, at that would have been useless. Not that the main browsers are reaching 100%, Acid2 is becoming useless, and Acid3 is necessary to see who has the best compliance. To use your school analogy, consider Acid2 to be the second grade. It is important to achieve that level, but when you do, you can expect the 3rd grade to follow it.
(And if your opinion of public schools is as low as mine, you are welcome to substitute "second grade" with level of knowledge that a 7 year old should have.
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox. But if you look at the latest development builds, Safari does far better than Opera and Firefox. Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Sorry, but this is just plain nonsense. It is like saying that C and C++ standards made programming easy. However, the truth is that even if you teach the whole world all the intricacies of C or C++, it still won't turn everybody into programmers.
Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
Are these really different? The Acid Tests test standards compliance, so if you do well on them, even if it is your aim to do so, aren't you embracing standards?
Any browsers that came out before the Acid3 test was released are doing absolutely dismally.
That's exactly the point of the Acid tests. They're designed to motivate browser developers by pointing out a lot of flaws in current implementations.
Well yes, but the Acid Tests can't and won't test *all* standards. So it's a question of whether and how much you prioritize those particular standards over other, possibly more important (whatever that means) ones.
I am trolling
I'm really not a Microsoft advocate but I work in Windows-only schools... I do completely understand the frustration but off the top of my head:
1) Group Policy integration
I can set browser settings (every single one that you see in IE's Internet options etc.) for a group of computers and fine-tune each setting to particular users. You don't want kids changing their proxy settings, you don't want them playing with trusted zones, you don't want them getting overwhelmed with dialogs when they log in for the first time. You don't want to have to set it up per-user.
2) Content that is IE only.
Everything is web-based nowadays. For instance, schools are pulling lesson plans, educational games, etc. off websites or "cached content" (i.e. stick a Linux box full of some companies flash-heavy website in your school and every month or so they'll update it for you... this is an actual product from several very expensive companies). Most of it works only in IE, although I have seen a few that will work on Firefox too. ActiveX is seriously over-used in the educational sector for example. And therefore if you want support (which schools in particular see as vital), you have to use IE.
3) The little blue E
Seriously, I have dozens of users (and I get more each year) who when they want the Internet go for the little blue E shortcut. I have actually replaced it with an identical-looking one that ran Firefox and only the "power-users" on the network actually noticed anything wrong. 450 kids just carried on working as if there was nothing different.
As soon as everybody gets off their backsides and gives me non-IE support on all the content that the schools carry, I'd move every school over. The next hurdle after that is making it easy to customise every option on a per-user/per-computer basis properly. The third is easily overcome even if it is selling your soul to put a decent browser behind the IE icon...
This is similar to saying that MS-DOS 5 has less bugs than Windows Vista hence MS-DOS 5 is far better than Windows Vista
Well yes, of course it has less bugs, because it's much smaller and supports far fewer features, but that doesn't make it better, it's nigh on useless for everything people want to do nowadays.
At the end of the day, IE5.5 supports less features and gracefully falls back where it fails on a feature as it should. IE6 and IE7 are much more ambitious and implement far more features, but when pushed to the limits on these features they fail more horribly than IE5 which doesn't even try. There is an argument that features shouldn't be implemented at all if they don't work perfectly but I disagree, the fact is the features in question almost certainly work in say 90% of cases it's just that Acid3 is specifically exploiting the cases where it doesn't work rather than where it does.
People are free to stick with IE5.5 if they like the fact it does better on the Acid3 test if they want, but don't come crying when you can't use half the features on sites that are designed for the new series of browsers.
Acid3 is doing it's job well, it's highlighting problems in implementations so that they can be fixed in future versions. I'm not sure why some people see Acid tests as a tool to attack browsers with, that's not the purpose. Whilst crappy journalism might like to use it for this purpose one would hope that Slashdot was above Daily Mail type shoddy stories.