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Firefox Beta Scores 93 On Acid3 Test

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the scored-worse-on-meth2-test dept.

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)."

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Safari and Chrome bound to get better? by javacowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better? by owlnation · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm wondering if it's just a matter of time before Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome become better than Firefox

      I use Firefox as my default browser too. I used to love it, now I tolerate it. Were adblock and flashblock available for Safari or Chrome (and I believe this is in development for Chrome), and were Chrome available as a Mac version, I would stop using Firefox overnight. Truth is as a basic browser these two are better already, as is IE.

      Firefox is dangling by a hair on my machines. It is entirely their own fault. They have ignored fundamental problems with the browser since version 1.0, and spent far too much time developing "features" that should have been add-ons. It's never really worked well on a Mac either. There seems to be a lot of Netscape influence in Mozilla, this is exactly how Netscape failed

      If Firefox 4.0 isn't multi-threaded and significantly stripped down, you can pretty much kiss it goodbye. This is a terrible shame. I want to continue to support it, however the Mozilla team is shooting itself in the foot far too much.

  2. Does reaching 100% by tepples · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Really? by Gordo_1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.