Firefox Beta Scores 93 On Acid3 Test

CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70, 71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari — still not only rates higher (I got scores of 99 once and 100 most of the time) but is usually faster by a little (1.1 sec avg. vs. 1.4 over ten runs apiece) but only because the new Firefox beta was all over the map — frequently better by 25% (.85sec) or tanking badly with rendering times in the 2.5 — 3 second range, and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)."

Comments

Just fix FF's stability damnit

[C_Kode]

I find the new versions of firefox are far less stable when it comes to AJAX sites. It appears to be getting better, but I just want th crashes to stop.

Acid tests are not a race

[bunratty]

Because the Acid tests are not a race. It will be big news when IE reaches a score in the 80s, even if all other browsers score 100/100. This is because it will be much easier for web developers to develop interactive applications that work in all browsers when web developers don't need to bend over backwards to get their sites to work in IE. With the Acid tests, it's the browser in last place that's important, not which one is in first place.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[Firehed]

Yes and no. While there are plenty of things you can't do on your websites as a designer/developer without cross-browser compatibility, you can save yourself some tremendous trouble on aesthetic work if you're willing to make some compromises. Look at border-radius, text-shadow, and box-shadow properties - none of them are critical to layout, each can add to a design, and each will fall back very gracefully in browsers that don't support the property.

If NO browsers support something, then you need a workaround. If only some support it, then you have to balance the importance of the element's presentation on the page with the ease of implementation (ex. do you use partially-supported border-radius or @font-face which takes thirty seconds, or do you a fully cross-browser hack which takes considerably longer?).

Re:Because we run Linux

[beelsebob]

Your package manager not having much software in it does not make your browser better. Only your package database worse.

Freetype and Apple patents

[viralMeme]

'One of the requirements is that the be able to render TrueType fonts. Correct rendering of Acid3 requires displaying a TrueType font called "Ahem"'

According to this Ahem is is in the public domain

"The big question: Does correct rendering of Ahem in Acid3 require the patented parts of TrueType?"

Freetype and Patents

"Myth 2: Apple Is Suing (or Sued) FreeType

This complete myth apparently started with this article on the SlashDot news site. Too bad the editors did neither care to check the submitted link nor even tried to contact us, we could have helped them!

It is true that we have been contacted by Apple's legal department, but that has never been in the clear intent of suing us, which isn't too surprising given that FreeType doesn't harm Apple in any way."

Re:Does this really matter?

[grumbel]

I really couldn't care less. Webbrowser these days seem to try everything to get pixel perfect rendering done, yet utterly fail at producing good looking readable webpages when there is even the tiniest deviation from the default. Try browsing with a larger default font for example, 99% webpages break, some worse then other, but pretty much all of them break. On Slashdot for example the "Reply to This" button falls apart on other webpages you are confronted with overlapping text and other unusable crap. And before somebody mentions the zoom feature, Firefox under Linux doesn't doesn't do any filtering when scaling, so all graphics look complete shit when zoom is used, making zoom unusable. There is other stuff that is annoying, for example the lack of build in support for link tags introduces in HTML2, you can get support via a plugin, but it would be nice to have solid support for that feature out of the box, maybe webpages would then finally start using it. But the most annoying thing is probably the lack of alternative view modes, I would like to have a modes that do not conform to pixel perfect rendering, but instead focus on producing readable results, i.e. avoiding overlapping text, making sure that line-width isn't to large, hide the navigation bars and all that other stuff, yet all the browser offers is pixel perfect rendering and rendering with no style sheets at all, neither of which is very readable. Luckily there is Readability which helps a good bit with that, making sure line-width is proper and navbars are gone, but again, it would be nice to have such basic stuff build into the browser.

The obsession with pixel perfect rendering and the complete ignorance on readable results is truly annoying and goes against anything that was considered "good practice" in the good old days.