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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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
IE6 and IE7 are obviously on crack...
-- My Weblog.
This really belongs on thedailywtf.com
I was very happy with IE.
people tell me to use firefox because it follows web standards, but from this, it shows that none of the browsers actually follow web standards...
sorry, I know the answer - Just trying to be smart.
If you can't own the internet, this is the next best thing.
This space available.
Why has there been no discussion on Slashdot of IE 8 beta 1?
Available here without any WGA crap.
(It gets 10/100, btw, and can't do Acid2 completely.)
I guess it just goes to show you that two wrongs do make a right. IE's abilities to render a web page reliably go so far into the realm of incompetence that they've gone straight through and come out the other side.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
That "C" should be the one with the little squiggly on the bottom. I'm sure I can find it in my character map, but don't want those without a Unicode compliant browser to see some Chinese character or something... since we are talking the various iterations of IE here.
IIRC, and someone with a better degree in Web History can probably elaborate, but wasn't IE 5.5 written with code which came over from IE5 for Mac, the first really well done major browser with nice CSS support? Tantek Celik was lead (or close to lead) on that, and set the pace for good CSS compliance... which MS dumped when building IE6 for Win, because they could have their flagship internet browser rendering better on those other guy's OS and not their own.
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.
The acid test website notes that the test may change over time as until it is debugged. Surely the page of collected results needs to record which version of the ACID3 test was used for each test, or at least the date on which each result was obtained?
Somebody moves the ends. IE 5 might just be passing it on a fluke. It's not as if it renders the Acid 2 smiley face better than 6 or 7. That said, either I'm not getting it, or the people setting up the acid tests aren't getting it- If no one is passing the "test" then the whole point of the test is moot. You might as well ask a politician for their detailed exit strategy in the war on terror. It's like granting a patent on something that never existed. It's what happens when you have standardized achievement tests in schools and teachers only teach to the test, while churning out students who lack critical thinking skills.
It's looking less like the browsers aren't really failing so much as the goals keep shifting.
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
Tomorrow, we cover the sun and how it rises. Every day.
not in Soviet Russia...
hmm. so 10% of the browsers do better on a given test. meanwhile, 90% of the browsers are used to view 99.999% of the world's web pages. but here at slashdot, we need to crank up the sanctimony and wag our finger.
lame. there is an abstract notion of 'standards compliant' and then there is something I like to call the 'de-facto standard'. guess which side of this dichotomy you stupid fuckers have failed with?
Acid 3 fails the IE test getting a best score of 17%.
Get with the program guys.... M$ discovered the Internet. It's theirs to stick their flag on wherever they like!
(Bloody natives getting restless again)
They ALL score less than 20. That's essentially random response to the test - so it's just a matter of luck if one scores better than another.
Brett
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%.
So I know most people here always give firefox a free pass (since it is FOSS and anti-Microsoft I'm sure), but IE isn't the only browser getting worse with time. If you actually look at those results, you can see that Firefox 3 is worse than Firefox 2. Makes you wonder if some good coders who initially architected both browsers (and really understood them) have left, leaving some less experienced coders doing the new work.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
In the days of 5.5:
"Internet Explorer isn't crappy enough! We need to make it worse!"
Thus, IE 6 and IE 7 were born.
-Aegis Runestone-
lol
yup!
Dear Customer,
We regret to hear of the shortcoming you found in ACID 3 Test Home Basic. We have not forgotten our advertised promise to pass the test. On that note, we are proud to introduce the ACID 3 Test Pro! IE8 happily passes this version of ACID 3, which is comprised of VBScript, ActiveX, and Silverlight technologies.
Yours Truly,
Department of Extending Standards and Compatibilities
Microsoft
Ç.
Option-C.
It's one of the most common non-ASCII letters, since it's also in French, and has been a required entity since at least HTML 1.0.
If you're going to insist on being teletype-compatible, you may as well go whole hog and say "Chelik". Non-Turkish-speakers will have a chance of pronouncing it correctly, and Turkish speakers will know what it means (because Turkish has no digraphs and "Ch" makes no sense).
really seems to be kicking ass at 90%; granted it is from a nightly build and not an official release.
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
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.
the answer is simple, the value given does not directly equate to a percentage of conformance, it just means it screwed up earlier or later...but does not indicate how much it screwed up by (or more importantly what ELSE would screw up). So i would imagine that IE 5.5 probably has does some things simply "differently" from the later versions that make it fail at a different time, but that doesn't mean it failed less badly.
proxy
If there doesn't exist a program that can render your test correctly, then how do you know for sure you wrote it correctly to begin with?
I wonder why they didn't test IE5mac :]
you are a cool kid? :)
A lot of you guys are sitting on the wrong side of the fence. Standards are definitely better for consumers. It makes things cheaper, easier, and over-all faster. But many of you seem to forget that you aren't just consumers -- you're employees too.
I run an internet application programming business. I don't want standards. Browser standards will make it really easy for anyone to create a web-page semi-well. Right now, my efforts are spent on the high-tech skills of managing a high-tech industry. If things become too easy, my skills will switch to competitive sales. That's good for the consumer who doesn't care about excess quality, sure. But it's just plain aweful for my employees. I'll pay them less, I'll outsource more.
Today, third-world cheap labour for metal and plastic and paper trumps any local labour. Do you want tech jobs to go the same way?
If your pay-scale is below average, then yeah, you want products to become as cheap as possible -- even at the expense of your own wages; with an obvious boundary flaw of course. But if your pay-scale is above average, as is mine and as are my employees, then you don't want products to become cheaper, you want things to become more expensive because your wages will grow faster than those costs.
You can't ask "where are all the tech jobs" and then "where are all the tech workers" and then "where are all the cheap tech products". Our culture doesn't work that way.
My vote goes for more complex browser programming. I've got the skills to dodge all the problems. I've got facilities, people, and high-powered servers under my control -- and a whole lot of experience. If every browser had a different syntax and different features, it's not hard to program. As it is, between language translations, print layouts, user preferences, and restricted access, I'm already supporting some twenty combinations. Two hundred isn't any more work.
But if it's complex and frustrating to do, then I don't have to worry about my 12 year-old self competing with me.
It our culture of capitalism and democracy, I'll cast my vote in the direction that makes my professional life profitable -- and I'll support my friends, family, employees, contractors, and clients in doing so. I'll produce high-quality products and services, I'll stand behind them, and I won't worry about competition.
Next time you can't find a job, or a product of any decent quality, remember how you cast your vote.
59% or lower = A
0% = B = PASS
I think that more systems should be tested. Try IE 5.5 on a copy of WinME, if someone tries this, IE might crash, several times. Or perhaps IE 5.5 on MacOS 9 and MacOS X? The Newton MP 2000 has a web browser too. Then there are all those old versions of Netscape Navigator stretching back to 1994. What about lynx, how well does it render Acid3?
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Okay, ACID is designed to find browser bugs. But I think my point remains valid; if the web standards had been a bit better designed (or perhaps merely a bit simpler), then the bugs would be less numerous and it would be easier to write a compliant HTML document.
zzzz
SOFTWARE LAWYERS forwards we must Same year, BSD 3e treated by your
The world has gotten so used to expecting so little from the internet (and MS browsers in particular) that the standards are regressing to match. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate (that ie 5.5 was ahead of it's time).
I just can't be bothered.
One of the primary components of the Acid test are to see if a browser will properly handle out of spec code.In this case "proper handling" means ignore it. IE is counter intuitive in this sense because it has facilities to "guess" what should happen.
Today I was borrowing someones computer and i went on a few websites with IE. When they came back they were disappointed because all of the sites i went to messed up there "recently visited" listing in IE. They were frustrated that that there would have to manually type the URLs of the pages to go to. Then I introduced them to the wonderful world of Favorites/Bookmarks, something I learned about back in 97. Now when I was in High School i tested out of all the intro to computer courses in order to take programming, so can anyone tell me what they teach in these classes. I mean seriously. Sometimes it surprises me how little people know about computers. Maybe its because I grew up in a city whose major employers included HP, Oracle, and BAE Systems( who bought Sanders, the inventors of the Magnavox Odyssey) . So maybe I just used to most people having a general understanding. It seems when I went to college the average computer skill per person I associate with dropped.The test should work from http://webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html and http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html, but IE8 fails the first one. The mirrors might exacerbate the problem, but they certainly did not introduce anything that wasn't in the original test.
However, it is true that this issue has nothing to do with hardcoding a certain URL and trying to cheat.
Typical Microsoft, they embraced when they should have extended.
College Humor at it's best
You missed Daniel Glazman, who contributes code for Mozilla.
Apologies for my pedantry.
There was a time before computers that companies employed hundreds of women punching data into manual adding machines in warehouse-like accounting departments.
Then a host of clever people decided that technology should be explored and refined, and the result was a new type of electronic universal adding machine which eventually caused all of those jobs to dissolve. --It also eventually resulted in the internet and the creation of your current job.
So we could either live in a world afraid of change which has no computers at all and a lot of 'safe' wage-slaves doing millions of hours of monkey work, or we could live in a world where exploration and refinement drive the human experience. . .
-FL
I don't think Microsoft deliberately wanted to break the standards. What would they get? They aren't becoming the standard that you claim so, they are just allowing other browsers to take more bites out of their market share. Now I know /. hates MS and would like to think that they're evil, maybe so... but in the IE compatibility-development department I think they've just become incompetent and complacent due to their monopoly.
I don't know why people still use IE. There's Firefox, there's Opera, and on both Mac and Windows, there is Safari too. There are plenty of other browsers out there if these three aren't good enough for you. Why in the world would anyone use IE?!?!? This is a sincere question. Would someone please tell me?
MS has redefined quality and anything else does not matter! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
....just saying.
IE 5 and IE 5.5 where developed during the period during which it appeared the government was going to atually do something about their monopoly -- during the period when DOJ was building their case and everyone was getting ready for what should have been a huge trial.
Everyone in their right mind (presumably including MS) was expecting something big like a breakup of the company was going to happen. So MS was having to play by the rules there briefly rather than the usually sabotaging anything they didn't already have monopoly control of. Once the trial was over, MS go back to trying to block out competitors by including IE as default browser on every PC sold and making it deliberately incompatible with standards so all sites would have to develop for compatibility with IE, thus being incompatible with anything else.
This post is not informative; it's wrong. Quit modding it as such.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Amaya 10, W3C's own browser and authoring tool would score 100%, if it didn't, that would be one hell of an embarrassment; it displays most pages in a horrible manner, probably because it applies the web standards so strictly, like an old uptight teacher lecturing you. The problem is, it doesn't even support Javascript, which you need for running this test. I wonder if this some kind of safeguard against hypothetical failures.
Windows 3.11 For Workgroups beats Vista at many tasks, and will run reasonably well on a 486. Is this a trend for Microsoft, older software outperforming newer software?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Yes, because my grandmother cares the same amount about ACID3 as she did about W3C and all the rest ...
:-
... but of course, Firefox wants to "sell" their browser too ("sell" as in finance it with Google revenue with their monthly kickbacks for defaulting to their homepage).
Look face it, the only people who care about "standards" are the ones who either
a) have some FOSS axe to grind
b) hate microsoft
Although, I guess in retrospect, I could just as easily of merged options (a) and (b), and you would have been hard pressed to tell the difference.
If Firefox et al is so "standards" compliant, how come it's okay for them to "bend" the standards with unsupported things like "innerHTML" which they only included to be competitive with MSIE and make sure more websites worked with their browser ?
If you REALLY cared about standards above all else, you'd follow them IMPLICITLY, regardless of the impact to the users
I call BS on the whole thing.
This test is for compliance with w3c. It has to do with accuracies, not speed or user experience.
The truth of the matter is, IE is its own standard because every developer must comply with it, as is Mozilla. And from the user's standpoint, this test again means nothing because it has nothing to do with experience.
Finally, to say IE5 beats IE7 is another distortion of substance, as they are actually 14%, 13% and 12% in their results, which, if isn't within the margin of error, is within any margin of approximation - they are all the same. The difference in the score between first and second place is 16.
These curve ball articles really do a disservice, as they are only interesting when distorted. If the boring truth were the headline it would read "IE continues to ignore W3C as everyone and their mother continue to follow its specs".
but it used to be that they implemented the stuff in their own browser: Amaya
So now we have to find which team did IE5.5 and which team did IE 7 and IE 8 etc ? Kudos to the M$ team which created IE 5.5
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
I am running Sugar build update.1 691 The browser is based on Gecko
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.
That's why I keep IE Tab installed on FF. So the standard is probably meaningless to the wider population of sites.
I suppose this raises the basic question of just how meaningful a public test like this is if everyone is actively working on their project for the specific purpose of passing the test. That's not a whole lot better than the allegations we saw earlier of browsers whose rendering engines tried to detect test pages and adjust their rendering in an attempt to pass it. I give kudos to the safari team for getting that far into the test, but I question just how meaningful that is when you consider it didn't pass that far because of how well it was designed - it got that far because it was specifically worked on to get that far on that specific test.
The true measure of a browser's test is of course how well it does on the day the test is released, which as a previous post points out, smoked most browsers pretty bad.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Subj. ;-)
Your logic proves the point of the need for standards which are not suggestions, as you construe them, but recommendations. The point of standards is not to document the state of the art but to provide a common reference point for everyone to use.
Following your logic, "standards" is synonymous with "observed behavior" which would mean that the behavior of the most-used rendering protocol would be the "standard." Can you see the problem? That would mean some flavor of IE would be the standard by the fact of being the most prevalent.
Standards don't describe the vernacular. Standards establish guidelines.
blog
Is that standards are all well and good but what they need in addition to them is a a proper working example and it should do/look like.
These tests have really given companies/people something to aim for and is easier to ensure that everything works as intended.
They also have the added bonuses of quantifying how close the renderer is and giving the public something they can easily understand.
By "features" you mean the ability to render sites that are specifically built to not work with anything but the latest version of msie? Such as msft's own site?
when IE is no longer the most widely used browser the acid test will mean something.
> > Microsoft doesn't WANT IE to be compatible.
> This might fit in well with Slashdot groupthink, but it doesn't fit in well with reality.
WTF? Are you aware of msft's history? Controlling the standard is central to msft's business model. Msft's philosophy is: "control the standard and the money will follow." Msft's EEE strategy has been well established - and not just on slashdot. Once msft get's of control of the standard - which msft did by msie 5.5 - msft then goes to work on extending the standard.
> Back when Internet Explorer 6 was being developed, they were in direct competition with Netscape.
I think you may need to review your timeline. By the time msie came out, msft owned over 80% of the browser market:
"5.x versions attained over 80% market share by the release of IE6 in August 2001."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5
> And when Internet Explorer development was restarted, they were responding to a call for improved standards support,which they have delivered on.
Ah yes, the incompatibilty "features" were put in because of user demand, just like DRM, and WGA. Isn't that standard msft PR?
> I'm sorry, but deliberate sabotage is a ridiculous way of explaining this.
Just like it's ridiculous to think that silverfish, or OOXML, are supposed to lock people in to msft's proprietary standards, right? Why will msft's own website not work with msie 5.5? And as I understand it, msft is going to incorporate silverfish into their own site.
#include
using namespace std;
int main()
{
int i;
for (i=0;i3;i++)
{
cout "IE5.5 passes Acid " i "\n";
}
cout "Ftw!\n";
return 0;
}
"There are quite a few good things about the Microsoft release, such as showing that HTML5 is looked at, Acid2 is (almost) being passed, and CSS support is improving, but there are quite a few evil things as well"
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad
No way to verify it passes Acid2?
Well, I have to say 1 thing: I installed IE8 beta yesterday on my home machine running Windows Server 2003 SP #2, fully hotfix patched as of the last "MS patch tuesday", & know what guys? It runs well, which admittedly, surprised me!
So far, IE8's doing the job & not crashing or screwing up on rendering pages, so, it's working well enough & imo @ least - surprisingly WELL, for a "beta version"!
(Still, one has to consider IE's got years of foundation behind it in IE builds & the Mosaic browser both it & Netscape grew out of).
Does it need work? Absolutely.
Many programs of appreciable relative size & complexity usually do, for @ least 1 yr. (possibly more, depending on the size of the application involved), but so far?? It's functionally ok for MY needs thusfar & I have tested it across plenty of sites so far!
MS just needs to truly "beef up" security in IE period, & kill the bugs (down to the 0% known bugs Opera 9.26 & Netscape 9.0.0.6 currently enjoy, imo @ least).
Now, from a web-dev's point-of-view, the rest of the changes can be made to make THEIR lives easier/simpler, but, I am not a "web dev" by trade, though I have done my share of it (don't like it compared to doing "true application development" really, but, nowadays, it is tough to avoid web dev work period) & am NOT aware of all the 'caveats' possible when creating a website for folks!
(Again though, I have done several ASP.NET works that are currently in production environs usage, & I am a developer on Win32 for 15 yrs. now mostly/really, & ASP.NET via Visual Studio makes it just like building a VB.NET app for the MOST part (some things you cannot do in ASP.NET that you can in VB.NET for std. apps, but you learn quickly enough what those are, & to use SESSIONS etc.)).
HOWEVER/DISCLAIMER:
Admittedly, I am MORE of an "Opera Fanboy" than I am of IE, but I have to say the truth, & that is, that IE 8 works well thusfar, already!
Curiously the index page for http://www.acidtests.org/ does not pass the W3C Validator ;)
Warning: No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
Warning: Unable to Determine Parse Mode!
Error: Line 1, Column 14: no internal or external document type declaration subset; will parse without validation.
Warning: Line 43, Column 47: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "lt".
Error: Line 43, Column 47: general entity "lt" not defined and no default entity.
Error: Line 43, Column 49: reference to entity "lt" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info: Line 43, Column 46: entity was defined here.
The era of real competition in mainframe hardware did not begin until the U. S. Government started requiring a COBOL compiler, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government purchase of computers.
On a much smaller scale, the era of real competition in the MUMPS language did not begin until the VA started requiring a MUMPS system, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government of computers.
The U. S. Government should require, as a condition for purchasing computers, that the default browser on the supplied OS be standards-compliant... e.g. should achieve a specified score, such as, say, 100%, on the ACID3 test.
When it procures things, the government is part of the free market. And it is one of the few entities powerful enough to engage with Microsoft in a real negotiation between equals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has the technical expertise to know what standards are, and what compliance is, and how to test it.
Just as with tanker aircraft, the government should buy what best serves the government's needs, without regard to what best serves the needs of The Boeing Company, or Microsoft Corporation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Thank you for submitting your resume. Unfortunately there are no positions currently available.
Did anybody ask for YOUR opinion, douchebag? Stay on topic, instead of being another miserable slashdot whacko.
You guy's call yourselves geeks, and all I see in the comments section is ramblings about differences in IE versions and no one mentioned the one obvious anomoly in Windows OS's compared to the respective IE versions??
In TFA: Internet Explorer 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Multiple IE) 14%
Internet Explorer 5.50.4134.0600 Windows ME 14%
Internet Explorer 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 13%
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 Windows XP Service Pack 2 12%
Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16609 Windows Vista (32-bit) 12%
Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP Service Pack 2 12%
Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 11%
Why does an older OS (Win ME), with an older version of IE5.5, perform better than W2K SP4 with the newest version of IE5.5, compared to Windows XP with the newest version of IE5.5??
That doesn't quite make sense. We all know that IE is integrated into windows OSs but if an older version of windows on the 9x version of architecture performs better than, arguably, *one* of the more better built operating systems, what does this say about both IE AND Windows OS's in general??
Secondly, why hasn't the author of TFA included which service pack of IE 6 they are using like they did with IE5.5?