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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.
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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.
It even has your same link right in the summary...
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Dear customer, We regret the shortcoming that you found regarding ACID 3 test results of IE8. Please note that it's still in its beta stage and we'll put all the efforts in making IE8 score below its proud precedences, IE5.5, 6 and 7, before its release! Stay tune. We've never failed before, we won't fail this time. Yours truly, Department of Embracing Standards and Compatibilities, Microsoft.
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%.
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
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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.
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?
No, it wasn't. Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows uses the Trident rendering engine. Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac uses the Tasman rendering engine. They are totally different codebases.
Actually, in most ways, Internet Explorer 6 has better standards support than Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The 100 subtests are nearly independent of each other. It's possible for a browser to fail a subtest simply because it failed an earlier subtest, but failing one subtest is not going to make a browser skip a major portion of the test. You can click on the A in Acid3 after the test is completed to see a report of exactly which tests failed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Windows 2003: 2.0.0.12 = 51%; 3.0 beta 3 (portable version) = 58% here.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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?"
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.
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.
College Humor at it's best
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.
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.
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