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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)."
This should be news when FF3.5 gets to RC or final release status.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Presumably the test should take about the same time to run each time, right?
Also, how can Safari's score change from 99 to 100 without any changes in the code? Is this a bug in Safari?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
How does it rate on Acid 1 & 2, and have the other browsers worked on reaching 100% on the previous tests also, or did they give up on previous tests when the next one was released?
First of all, I'm not trolling.
Secondly, Firefox is my favourite browser, and I use it as my default both at work on my Windows workstation and at home on my Mac.
Having said that, with two corporate giants with deep pockets, and their respective browsers making solid improvements with every version, I'm wondering if it's just a matter of time before Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome become better than Firefox, which is essentially a community effort. That's not to say anything bad about the excellent work that Mozilla's programmers have done with Firefox, but they're doing so by drawing on fewer resources than those two large corporations.
Granted, Microsoft also has a lot of resources to draw from, but they also let IE stagnate because they thought they had a browser monopoly.
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I think that on balance users will see the perceived cost* of switching browser as much greater than the perceived cost of not viewing your site. That's not a criticism on your site, I'm just saying for anything short of Facebook they're not going to bother.
Why not detect if they're using IE and have a pop-up saying "Does this site look broken? Your browser does not properly support internet standards." and direct them to the appropriate explaination, list of browsers, etc. That gets the same message across without costing you any readership, and it removes the elitist connotations that "special browsers" seem to have.
* Emphasis on "perceived". I do find that users adapt to new browsers more easily than they think: my mother wound up easily switching from IE to a customised Firefox-lookalike when her broadband company's setup disk automatically installed it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Don't bother us until they reach 100%.
One of the requirements is that the be able to render TrueType fonts. Correct rendering of Acid3 requires displaying a TrueType font called "Ahem". Unless an underlying graphical environment gives applications the privilege of installing arbitrary fonts into the display server, the application code has to do its own rendering. In any case, perfect rendering of TrueType fonts involves interpreting a hint bytecode, which is subject to a U.S. patent.[1] There is no evidence that Apple provides royalty-free licenses for general use in free software. FreeType 2 comes with an "auto-hinter" that does the patented part of TrueType in a different way that doesn't infringe, but its results aren't pixel-for-pixel identical to those of the TrueType spec.
The big question: Does correct rendering of Ahem in Acid3 require the patented parts of TrueType?
[1] Slashdot, Apple, W3C are headquartered in the United States, and the majority of the Web Standards Project's managers and members are in the United States. "Sucks to be you, American" is flamebait.
As I appear into my crystal ball, I see that Firefox 3.5 is released and still achieves 93/100. Wow, I'm a psychic!
Ffx 3.1/3.5 has been sitting at 93/100 for over 6 months, and the devs have stated *numerous* times that achieving 100/100 on Acid3 is NOT a priority for the 3.5 release, largely because implementing SVG fonts (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490/) for the purpose of passing those last few Acid3 tests is a much lower priority than other things they're working on (like javascript JIT). Why your summary of the 3.5b4 release focuses on something that literally hasn't changed in several beta releases is beyond me.
So, can we please move on now or are you going to switch to Safari because of that newfangled Youtube interface that implements SVG fonts? Oh sorry, I was looking into my crystal ball again and saw the web circa 2025.
Ahem is is in the public domain
A work can be free, but if it requires a non-free underlying platform, the work is Java-trapped. For example, applications for the Java platform were Java-trapped until Sun released Java as free software, and any Windows-only app that does not work in Wine is Java-trapped. And if the correct appearance of Ahem requires a patented rendering method, Ahem is likewise trapped.
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
I didn't say Apple was suing the FreeType project directly. I was only saying that Apple hasn't licensed the patent for use in free operating systems or free web browsers. In such a scenario, Apple might sue the publisher of the operating system (e.g. Canonical or Red Hat) or the web browser (e.g. Mozilla Corp), even if it doesn't sue the FreeType project. That's why I want to know whether correct rendering of Ahem in Acid3 depends on hint bytecodes. If it doesn't, there's no problem.
To go along with this, it took me 30 seconds to add curved corners to some block level elements with -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius. It took me about 5 hours to hack in a particular unicode character that looks like a dot, blow it up to 150px size, and absolutely position it on all four corners so I could get it to work in ie7 (forgot the link that taught me that nasty but brilliant trick). This was because, in this case, my employer wanted curvy corners in ie7.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Yah, why does everyone pass over Opera? (It's the browser for most mobile cell phones as well as the Wii and many others).
Opera 10 hits 100/100 already and it's so stable, I've been using it for what seems like months already.
Funny, if Firefox/O.S. was so good, how come they can't beat a small band of closed-source guys up in Norway? Opera is smaller, faster and more standards compliant....hmmm