Acid3 Race In Full Swing, Opera Overtakes Safari

enemi writes "Just a few days after Safari released version 3.1, Opera employee David Storey writes on his blog that they've overtaken Apple's browser in the Acid3 test. In the race to be the first to reach the reference rendering, Opera's software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%. He also noted the implemented features will not make a public appearance in the following weeks, because they are getting close to releasing Opera 9.5. That version has been under public testing since September and the new CSS3 color modes and font rendering features might further delay this. They will probably show the score in a preview build soon and wait for a post 9.5 stable build to release the new features to the public." Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z : Opera is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%. Update: 03/27 by J : Public build r31356 of WebKit (Safari's rendering engine) is at 100%.

Comments

Competition - gotta love it

[PhrostyMcByte]

'nuff said.

too late

[jbreckman]

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/03/26/opera-and-the-acid3-test opera wins

Re:too late

[Carthag]

Webkit is also up to 98/100 now. It'll probably be there within a day.

http://webkit.org/blog/

Re:too late

[The Ancients]

Until I can browse and see 100/100 on my screen, I don't see it as too late. 98/100 is the highest I've seen when browsing http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Apparently Duke Nukem Forever is a great game, too...

Re:too late

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, Opera can do it, but isn't going to release the capability -- wonderful.

Safari 3.1 is a full release, and Firefox is a publicly available beta release. In my book Opera is losing the race. The race is silly, but Opera is still losing.

Re:too late

[VGPowerlord]

Last time I checked Internet Explorer was losing. :P

Old News :)

[niXcamiC]

Newer builds pass with 100% http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/03/26/opera-and-the-acid3-test

Re:Old News :)

[umrain]

Just to be clear, reaching 100/100 is not equal to passing Acid 3.

To pass the test,a browser must use its default settings, the animation has to be smooth, the score has to end on 100/100, and the final page has to look exactly, pixel for pixel, like this reference rendering.

Opera has not currently made any claims about the animation smoothness that i have seen, and the screenshot is still missing a space after the first comma. Obviously reaching the 100/100 goal is great progress but they are not quite across the finish line yet.

Actually...

[R.Mo_Robert]

Actually, as of today, Safari is also at 98/100. See today's entry in the WebKit blog for more.

Re:Safari gets 96%?

[Anonymous Coward]

Update your WebKit. You can get nightly builds from the webkit site that include a script to launch an existing install of safari using the new version.

Shoot..

[zulater]

With Firefox 2.0.0.13 I've been doing just find rendering the render image properly!

http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html

Does public release matter?

[NiKnight3]

Which is a better title: "First browser to reach 100/100" or "First publicly-released browser to reach 100/100"? I might argue for the latter. If anything, I think this gives the WebKit team more of a spark to reach the end.

The Next Milestone

[powerlord]

Okay, So Opera Firefox and Safari all are shooting for compliance with Acid3.

The next major milestone though, right after "X Achieves 100% compatibility in nightly builds" is "X releases version X of browser to the masses/into the wild, capable of passing Acid3 test".

Passing it "in the lab" is one thing, declaring it in a build "ready for release" is another.

Re:The Next Milestone

[The Ancients]

Either way, the consumer wins. The faster development builds get it right, the faster it will end up in a shipping, public release, build.

Lets give the developers all the motivation we can to get this to happen. If that means a pissing contest of nightly builds, let 'em go for it, I say.

Someone better get a move on...

[Angostura]

... and get Acid 4 ready.

Incorrect update

[Midnight Thunder]

Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z : Safari is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%.

Looks like someone wasn't reading what they were writing. The links are right though.

Safari vs. Safari

[choongiri]

Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z: Safari is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%.

**$%..brainsplode

Re:Update:

[whitehatlurker]

Can you spot the problem?

Um, Zonk?

Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[recoiledsnake]

The problem with races is that the teams do almost anything just to cross the finish line faster. The speed at which the browsers seem to be gaining acid3 compatibility is frankly worrying me. Any developer worth his salt knows that browsers are huge and complex applications and every change must be discussed, designed and implemented properly as to not impact something else and be modular, be properly commented and be clean and well written code.

Also, Acid3 is just about the corner cases, and might not reflect the full standard completely. So a browser can pass the test and still suck at implementing standards, though passing the test is good step. It's just that the high speed of the compatibility improvements for ACID3 in almost all the mainstream browsers screams of hackathon coding sessions to get those few points a day till 100 so that there can be a marketing and PR blitz rather than properly planned programming. I think there is a very good chance of the code containing hacks and workarounds and also tons of security loopholes because of the insane speed at which features are being thrown into the code.

I think there is a very good chance of the new code containing hacks and workarounds and also tons of security loopholes because of the insane speed at which 'features' are being thrown into the code just to make headlines. Being a programmer, I am sure that non-trivial portions of the code will have to be rewritten later. Haste makes waste.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[recoiledsnake]

Bad form to reply to myself, but just wanted to add that this reminds me of the days of Netscape in which features were adding in a slapdash manner and with hardly any design or planning, which lead of the extreme bloat and memory leaks which the Firefox developers are still trying to get rid of to this very day(have you checked out Firefox's source code? Believe me, it's not pretty). I bet IE's code was as bad or worse because of the browser wars and was riddled with tons of security vulnerabilities which seem to have lessened only over the past few years. KHTML and Opera on the other hand seem to have developed and maintained a lean codebase(Opera had a total rewrite for version 7 IIRC).

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Bogtha]

The problem with races is that the teams do almost anything just to cross the finish line faster.

Do you have any evidence for this?

Any developer worth his salt knows that browsers are huge and complex applications and every change must be discussed, designed and implemented properly as to not impact something else and be modular, be properly commented and be clean and well written code.

No, browsers aren't actually all that large (the rendering engines for the Opera desktop browser and the mobile browser are the same), and you don't have to painstakingly discuss absolutely everything. Nothing would ever get done.

It's true that rushing to meet one goal can cause regressions elsewhere; that is what regression tests are for. And I don't know about Opera, but Safari/Webkit has plenty of them.

I think there is a very good chance of the code containing hacks and workarounds and also tons of security loopholes because of the insane speed at which features are being thrown into the code.

So this is actually just wild-ass speculation and not something you have solid reasons to believe?

Yes, Safari and Opera are both moving fast. Extremely fast compared with Firefox and Internet Explorer. But that is because they are much smaller codebases. Gecko is huge and crufty. Changing one thing can have knock-on effects all over the place. Internet Explorer has three very different rendering engines attempting to remain compatible with years-old intranet applications.

One of the reasons Apple chose KHTML instead of Gecko for Safari was that it was much smaller and had a cleaner design. And that choice has paid off in spades, the turnaround on new features and functionality is extremely quick.

Opera have been focusing on the mobile market for a long time now, it's a core part of their business and a substantial portion of their revenue, so they've always kept the code small and manageable.

What you are seeing here are not crazy hacks, but the consequences of years of savvy architectural and management decisions. When you invest in clean design up-front, the cost of efforts like this is vastly reduced.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Drishmung]

Possible, but I suspect that, at least for Opera and Safari, this is not the case.

Opera have said that they get 100/100, but they are not yet claiming victory. They are fixing a brand new implementation, that will be released 'soon', when it is ready. I imagine that the release will involve a ton of regression testing and code quality analysis.

Likewise Safari has various standards that the code has to adhere to. Reading the Webkit blog entries so far I get the feeling that it has not been enough merely to pass a test; there has been extensive consideration the best way to fix the code.

Yes, it's a race, but not at any cost, and the goal is not to just pass Acid3, it's to deliver a better browser.

Thus far, I'm optimistic that Acid3 is improving the overall code quality of the participating browsers.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Zebra_X]

I don't agree that this is not clear.

you know the right side is a boolean expression, and that you are assigning the result of the expression to the left.

in fact, it is actually more clear, and less error prone to do it the first way - there is never an opportinity to "accidently" assign the wrong boolean value to the variable where as in the second case it is up to the programmer to properly interpret the boolean comparison and assign the proper outcome to the variable.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Bogtha]

165MB is a HUGE amount of source code for something that you claim has a 'much smaller and cleaner' design and is "not all that large".

Firstly, that tarball is a SVN working copy and includes such things as Bugzilla and other Webkit-related websites/web applications, testcases, etc. Deleting the Subversion directories alone drops the uncompressed size by a gig from ~1.4GB to ~400MB. Deleting most of the testcases drops that ~400MB to ~100MB. Deleting the websites drops that ~100MB to ~80MB. So you see the actual source code for Webkit only comprises about 5% of the archive, and there's a bunch of testcases and support tools I missed removing there.

Secondly, I didn't say that Safari is "not all that large". I said that browsers are not all that large. Download, for example, KDE, and see how small a part of it Konqueror is. You were characterising developing a browser as this monumental effort that required a special, painstakingly slow development approach. In reality, there are far larger codebases that are worked on at a much faster rate by many more people, with way less communication. Browsers really aren't anything special in this regard.

Thirdly, it's not just my claim about the relative sizes of the codebases. Check out the announcements (1 and 2) explaining the reasons for going with KHTML:

Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance

Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive.

Do you think Webkit is ten times the size it was then? Or do you think Gecko is ten times smaller than it was then?

Instead of fixing the rendering of the 'Ahem' font, it seems to turn off font smoothing just to make it look like the reference rendering(note that it does it only for the web font). What about such bugs for other fonts?

Ahem isn't a real font. It's a dummy font that only has four glyphs and weird sizing. Its glyphs need to have very specific dimensions in order for the test to be accurate. Turning off font smoothing for this font in particular is enforcing those very specific font metrics. Yes, it looks like a hack, but that's far from the whole truth. In the real world, users that change their font sizes would also cause "failures" like this; the specific font metrics of the Ahem font are assumed by the test for accurate results. At worst, you could say it's a hack to set up the necessary conditions for the Acid3 test to run. These font metrics aren't part of the Acid3 test, they are a prerequisite for accurate results.

Bug 17086 is the bug you should be looking at for background. The question is whether or not antialiasing/font smoothing should have an effect on font metrics or if it should be clipped. It may turn out that the Acid3 test is updated to make this a non-issue.

What about such bugs for other fonts? Brushed under the carpet called Acid3 compliance.

Here you go misrepresenting your guesses as actual fact again. If you don't know the details, don't make accusations like that. Should antialiasing/font smoothing increase the size of text slightly or is that a bug? That's a difficult question to ans

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[bluephone]

You're on crack. Firefox is based on Gecko, the ground-up new engine started in late 1998. What you remember from the Netscape 4.x days is gone, dead, history. Very very very little original code from those days is left. 98% of Firefox code is new compared to Netscape 4.x. The entire architecture of the app is radically different than 4.x in that's it's relatively sane. Huge and complex, but sane. the Mozilla platform implements a lot more basic structures than NS4 did, to implement things like XPCOM, XUL, etc. Your comparison is way off base.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Durandal64]

No, you don't write code only once. You revise it, over and over again. If you suddenly changed your mind and wanted the opposite behavior (like, if you changed m_allowFontSmoothing to m_disableFontSmoothing), you'd have to change two lines and two constants instead of just replacing an exclamation mark with an equal sign. Generally, the fewer places you manipulate a variable, the better. And avoiding unneeded branching is generally a good thing, too.

In the first example, you're expressing a relationship between two variables in one line, containing one assignment and one comparison. In the second, you are using one comparison, two assignments and branch. It's less efficient, and the relationship isn't as explicit.

What about IE?

[Chabil Ha']

This is really cool that competition has provoked a response from the browsers to be compliant, but until IE is compliant, does it make a lick of difference? The combined market share of these ACID3 browsers is ~25%, so in the scheme of things, I'm still not going to be developing sites that take advantage of the newest features.

IE8 is still puttering around with ACID2...so I hate to sound like the cynic...

Re:What about IE?

[alexhs]

I've heard that latest build of IE8 would do 103.6/100 .
But, in order to get that remarkable achievement, you might need to use it in conjunction with MS Excel 2007...

Re:Safari gets 96%?

[n8_f]

What version is getting 96%?

WebKit nightly builds. Just go to http://nightly.webkit.org/, download, and run. It currently gets 96%, tomorrow's will get 98% or better.

Re:I'll probably burn in karma-land for this

[recoiledsnake]

If this were news about IE, I'd care. If it were news about Firefox, I'd care. Since I'm a Mac user, if it were news about Safari I'd probably care, at least a little (although I use Firefox). But Opera? I don't even test my stuff against that browser - it's just never been particularly relevant.

First off, Opera use is large enough for the company to survive on revenue from Google from the search bar(just like FireFox). I've seen figures of 1 to 2% of use, and when you factor in the huge number of web surfers, ~1% is nothing to sneeze at.

Now, I realize that Opera zealotry is as fervent as the worst Mac fans, and loses nothing to the Nikon/Canon camps; but really - the installed base is tiny. When I look at my site stats, Opera doesn't even show up (and even Netscape 4.x still has a tiny sliver of the pie). So I'm not sure even the "competition is good for everyone" argument particularly applies here.

That's pretty narrow minded thinking. Many of the features in Firefox and and it's extensions are Opera innovations or it was the first browser to have a good implementation. You can see some of the innovations here . Of course, Opera has taken some cues from Firefox too, but I think it's safe to say that all the browsers have benefited because of the existence of Opera. Hence, it's not 'irrelevant' just because there are hardly any hits from Opera on your site. Many of the features you enjoy in Firefox have their root in Opera.

100/100 Doesn't Mean Much If Pages Don't Render

[qazwart]

I'm very happy to see both Safari and Opera take the Acid3 test so seriously. However, despite Safari's 98/100 score, I still have problems with Midas/DocumentMode issues. This affects the basic installation of TinyMCE, an extremely popular editor for blogging software. It is used in Confluence, Joomla, Mambo, and many other software projects.

I also know there are places where Safari simply renders pages illegibly. I've seen this on Joomla forums where Safari cannot render the boxes on top of a forum post correctly (see for an example. Here "home", "threaded views", "home", and "help" are not rendered correctly in Safari.

I know most of this has to do with non-standard behavior first instituted by Microsoft (who else), but IE represents about 80% of the browser market, so when Microsoft creates a standard like Midas/DocumentMode, it becomes an important part of the Web. FireFox and Opera have no problems with this. Unfortunately, Safari, the browser that hews so closely to WC3 standards simply cannot be used on many websites.

Re:Standards - gotta love em

[hackstraw]

Remember the days when websites would yell at you telling you that you needed to use a certain version of an OS, with a certain version of a certain browser, with the latest pre-alpha VRML plugin and 1024x768 resolution?

Now, you don't even need a computer to browse the web.

That is progress.

I use Safari at home and Firefox at work (both with flash blockers), and I can do anything.

Back when Microsoft tried to take over the web, I had many issues with many sites. I don't remember the last problem I've had viewing a website.

And this is without government regulation or anything.

Next up, standards for multimedia on the web.

Sorry to sound like a zealot, but...

[porneL]

The "zealotry" is answer to unfair dissing of Opera. The company is working really hard on their browser and promotion of web standards, and yet from the general public all they get is "x%? I don't give a shit".

• Hakon Lie, Opera CTO is co-author of CSS and initiator of Acid2 test,
• Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5, was Opera employee when the work started, and is creator of Acid3 test,
• Opera invented/popularized MDI (pre-tabbed) browsing, mouse gestures, zoom and shrink-to-fit, HTML+CSS+JS on mobiles (including non-smartphones!), views-based e-mail client (think GMail),
• They actively fight Microsoft by filing complaints to EU, sued them for MSN, ridiculed IE with Acid tests and b0rk editions, fight IE-only websites with Open The Web campaign and they are getting excellent SVG, CSS and native video support to offer free and open alternatives to Silverlight and Flash.

In the US the browser alone might not be directly relevant, but Opera Software influenced the market quite a bit: IE8 was released soon after Opera filed complaint to EU and IE8's big news is passing Opera CTO's Acid2 test. Opera taken lead role in WHATWG and started implementing [X]HTML5. Before that W3C didn't consider any major revisions of HTML4 or XHTML1.

They really deserve some more respect.

Re:shameful

[Bogtha]

It's not the outrageous hack you think it is. Ahem is a dummy font that needs to have specific sizing in order for Acid3 to give accurate results. If Ahem doesn't have the specific size assumed by the Acid3 test, that means Acid3 can't give accurate results, not that Acid3 failed. So the Webkit developers disabled font smoothing for that specific font so that Acid3 could give accurate results, not to cheat. This isn't cheating because Acid3 isn't testing the font size, it's assuming the font size. It doesn't make sense to test the font size because that's volatile in real world conditions anyway.

Re:Standards - gotta love em

[dryeo]

And this is without government regulation or anything. I could of sworn there has been antitrust cases over MS and IE. Both in the USA and EU.
I'd say the antitrust case, even though just a slap on the wrist, did slow MS down and that is one of the reasons that the internet has improved.

Wait! This just in...

[qazwart]

There was a bug in the Acid3 test suite. That bug prevented WebKit from getting a 100/100 score. Now, that the bug is fixed, WebKit is scoring 100/100. How Opera could have scored 100/100 before the test was fixed is beyond me.

What's more, since WebKit is released nightly, WebKit is the first publicly released browser to score 100/100 on the Acid 3 tests.

BTW, as both teams will point out, scoring 100/100 on the Acid3 test doesn't mean the browser "passed" the Acid3 test. It has to match the reference page pixel for pixel and its rendering has to be smooth. Opera is off by a couple of pixels in its rendering. WebKit is pixel-perfect, but Test 26 takes too long to complete.

And, Opera could still be the first officially released non-beta browser to score 100/100 on the Acid3 test.