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

Firefucks is the Best

[Anonymous Coward]

I love firefucks, even though they sometimes leave a mess on my carpet.

Fucking on the ground like an animal - it does a body good.

Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, that's not good enough.

Re:Umm...

[mftb]

Make something better then.

Re:Umm...

[VisceralLogic]

Why bother? Apple's already done it with Safari... I just checked myself, running beta 4 for Mac and Windows and both scored 100.

yeeeeh!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The world will never be the same again

Improvment at a cost.

[Pvt_Ryan]

That is good but in the latest b4 they have disabled closing the windows by middleclicking the last tab, it now defaults to noop.

Now if we can just get IE to follow the real standards then website building will no longer be a task for the damned.

Meh.

[Chabil Ha']

This should be news when FF3.5 gets to RC or final release status.

Re:Meh.

[orsty3001]

Didn't Google Chrome 2.0.176.0 get a 100/100, and Opera 10.0? Why do we care if something got a lower score?

Re:Meh.

[Klaus_1250]

Agreed. Yesterdays 3.6a1pre scores 94/100 btw.

Re:Meh.

[Chrisq]

Not Google Chrome anyway

Re:Meh.

[Tacvek]

Didn't Google Chrome 2.0.176.0 get a 100/100[...]?

Not on my machine. It shows 100/100, but the animation is not smooth, and the red words "LINKTEST FAILED" appear on my machine. Both of which mean Chrome does NOT pass Acid 3.

Re:Meh.

[Runaway1956]

http://s217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/?action=view&current=Midori_Acid3.png

Scores of 100 are months old. I uploaded this screenie only weeks ago, after I misplaced the older screenie showing the same thing. Download and test Midori. Consistent fast times, and scores 100 every time.

Re:Meh.

[RiotingPacifist]

I don't get how this is news! I'm sure firefox 3.1 beta 2 scored ~93 too, firefox 3.1 (now 3.5) was stabilized and heavy feature development was moved to the 3.2 branch long ago. I'd be more interested in an article detailing why 3.5 isn't out yet?

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

How comes this is "news", yet Opera having 100/100 on Acid 3 for a very long time now does not even get a mention?

You lot need to step back and listen to yourselves...

Whatever next? "Firefox 3.5 only leaks 17% of it's memory now"....

Why the variation?

[MMC Monster]

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?

Re:Why the variation?

[auzy]

One of the tests is related to rendering speed (#69) not design faults. That's because it wants the test to be completed fast enough to achieve 30fps.

Under system load, or browser load (such as extra stuff being done in the rendering thread whilst the test is running), a browser may not always pass this test. Whilst its an OK test, there will be no way to reliably pass it 100% of the time, and as CPU's become faster and more efficient, its likely browsers will pass eventually regardless of if they optimise their code or not.

Its also one example of why the ACID tests are quite overrated.

Re:Why the variation?

[jonnyt886]

If you have any caching proxies on your network or your ISP has any transparent caches (many do nowadays), that might affect things.

Also, has the Acid3 site been slashdotted? :)

Re:Why the variation?

[ArcticCheetah]

I won't be surprise to find a large chunk of Safari Code is just to pass this silly test. Come on 20+MB for a web browser?

Re:Why the variation?

[newell98]

I believe the test actually decreases the allowed time to complete over time. The base test was designed to pass on reasonably optimized code on a top-of-the line MacBook Pro. So yes, running the test on this years high-end computer will pass, but that doesen't mean the test will pass in 2-3 years time.

Re:Why the variation?

[impaledsunset]

I never understood why did they include speed in a browser test? OK, a browser should perform rendering as fast as possible, because the web is starting to demand it, and web developers are abusing scripting a lot, but it would mean that the best browsers would fail on a slower computer, and the worst would pass on a faster one. This is not objective.

Not to mention that setting a threshold for speed is impossible. Who says how fast is fast? If the web developers have use decent and modest scripting, it will go faster, if they created inefficient monsters, it is going to crawl. You might say how much fast is fine, but then a task might turn out to be more demaning and the current threshold not enough for it.

In related news, I've run Midori on a slow Neo 1973, and it passes ACID 3. I found that surprising.

Re:Why the variation?

[moranar]

I don't follow your logic. They test whether, under load, the js engine responds quickly, and for you that's 'overrated'?

Sure, in a year the hardware will allow us to deprecate the test, but right now (and at the time the test was developed) it does not.

At the very least, the test says 'Don't assume you can always have 30 fps displayed', which is a useful -if perhaps obvious- notion.

Re:Why the variation?

[Red Flayer]

One of the tests is related to rendering speed (#69) not design faults. That's because it wants the test to be completed fast enough to achieve 30fps.

That's blatantly false.

The reason the browsers have so much trouble with #69 is that they have to stop and turn around.

Re:Why the variation?

[xouumalperxe]

If midori was a bleeding edge version, it's not surprising: it's a webkit-based browser, and webkit is what's scoring highest anyway.

Re:Why the variation?

[PitaBred]

Think of it as encouraging extra stuff to NOT be done in a single rendering thread, then. It's almost impossible to NOT buy a multi-core machine any more. Why should browsers, one of the most commonly used applications, remain single-threaded?

Re:Why the variation?

[mabhatter654]

not really, in order for web apps to be functional developers need to have some baseline that a function of given complexity will complete in a certain time.... That is one of the key features that Flash and Silverlight and ActiveX provide... the ability to have thing happen according to TIME.

Re:Why the variation?

[ThatsNotPudding]

Also, how can Safari's score change from 99 to 100 without any changes in the code?

Something do to with not expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

Re:Why the variation?

[coolsnowmen]

Because my computer doesn't just run firefox. Currently, when I load a webpage that spikes my cpuload, I like that the rest of my computer interaction remains snappy. Also, I feel that it would encourage poor web development. I never want browsing the internet to require a multi-core processor.

It's almost impossible to NOT buy a multi-core machine any more.

Netbooks?

Re:Why the variation?

[jaiyen]

as CPU's become faster and more efficient, its likely browsers will pass eventually regardless of if they optimise their code or not.

Not true AFAIK - although I can't find the exact reference offhand and haven't checked the code, I remember reading that this speed test is written to become gradually more demanding over time to keep pace with computers getting faster.

Re:Why the variation?

[Anonymous Coward]

ACID3 is overrated because:
1) Just because browsers pass the ACID3 speed test, doesn't mean they will run at 30fps in a real situation. It just means that the developers looked at the ACID3 test and optimized their browser to pass it. In real usage, some commonly used functions may run woefully slow.
2) Browsers which work on exclusively passing ACID tests does not make them any more standards compliant then the rest. It only means they pass a small set of standards.
3) ACID3 tests plenty of draft extensions. That's nice, except that website developers probably shouldn't be relying on them anyway (as they can change at any time).

In fact, this is apparently the reason Microsoft did not bother with ACID3 for IE8. Unlike ACID2, ACID3 isn't really about standards compliance testing.

Re:Why the variation?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I never understood why did they include speed in a browser test?

Because if you can't do it quickly it isn't functional. It's just like specifying video has to play at a given, acceptable frame rate to pass a test that confirms something can play said video. Playing it jerkily in an unwatchable way is not good enough

...but it would mean that the best browsers would fail on a slower computer, and the worst would pass on a faster one. This is not objective.

Which is why the ACID tests each specify reference hardware, like most respectable test suites do. That is objective. Just because you don't have or use that reference hardware and run the test more informally does not mean it is a flaw with the test instead of your procedure.

Not to mention that setting a threshold for speed is impossible. Who says how fast is fast?

The people who write the test pick a minimum acceptable rate and the feature is supposed to be able to function in a timely dependent manner. If it can't it doesn't work with the spec.

Right, which is why the latter is not sufficient for the assigned purpose, just as a Web browser that can render a background color, but it takes four hundred years, isn't in conformance with that specification for all practical purposes. When you're dealing with static elements, slow is pretty relative. When you're dealing with animations, time is a easily defined and crucial part of the spec.

Re:Why the variation?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost impossible to NOT buy a multi-core machine any more.

Netbooks?

FYI, most netbooks at least have hyperthreading now (so 2 virtual cores, which for me mostly works/feels like 2 cores).

Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 10alpha is also a 100/100 on the acid 3 since dec 12, 2008

http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Opera rocks your fucking socks.

Too bad I mainly use it as my porn browser - though I guess that's where a good web browser is most useful...

Re:Opera 10 as well

[MasseKid]

Only if you want a secure browser with mouse gestures and if you think passing the acid test is a good thing.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently dropped Firefox because I got sick of the bloat and longstanding bugs (like the memory leak and CPU spikes). Now I'm on Opera and I really love it. It has so much functionality built in but it's still smaller and faster. I haven't tried the Opera 10 alpha yet, but perhaps I'll do that now.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that useful open source browser that people can modify? If nothing else, at least its rendering engine is open-source...

Re:Opera 10 as well

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Only if you want a secure browser with mouse gestures

Not to rain on your parade (I think Opera is an excellent browser on Windows), but mouse gestures are one of those features like spell checking, grammar checking, and language translation, that should be implemented at the OS level rather than the application level. It is really cool that Opera has mouse gestures, but it really sucks it only uses the Opera ones on OS X where you can use mouse gestures across the whole OS in all applications that use the standard APIs (which Opera doesn't).

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh yeah, except you can't use any of the awesome Firefox add-ons. Adblock, Flashblock, Noscript, YouTube video downloaders, etc, etc. Firefox is still superior to everything else because of the huge add-on library.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[bluesatin]

Opera has an inbuilt Adblock, Flashblock and NoScript.

I can't say the same about YouTube video downloaders, but I just use the Opera Cache viewer to get the .flv files anyway.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[SalaSSin]

Opera has an inbuilt Adblock

Yeah, but you can block only one layer.
A lot of times, there's a layer of ads underneath the blocked one, and they are shown without any possibility to block.
(btw: this was on Opera 9, i don't know if they finally changed that)

Re:Opera 10 as well

[ya really]

You dont need an addon to get you tube videos, lol, just some javascript knowledge or use the code on this link. (you can do this with more than just opera, firefox will work find with a bookmark as well).

I just make a user button in opera to grab the videos with that. Lets you do it in both .flv and .mp4 format.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, that useful open source browser that people can modify?

It may be surprising to some, but most people use their browser to surf the web, not to hack its source.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[knails]

The memory leak bug is gone, and has been gone for a long time now.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[RiotingPacifist]

Aren't BringThePorn, DownloadThemAll, Link widgets and kasparov online scanner (for the STDs) the extensions he'd want???

Also your troll fails because firefox betas have a much smaller number of addons available

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Opera 10 as well

[LingNoi]

Also your troll fails because firefox betas have a much smaller number of addons available

I fail to see how the GP is a troll when he's pointing out that Firefox addons conflict with the parent's "Opera rocks your fucking socks" statement.

In fact the beta wasn't mentioned at all.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless they miraculously fixed it since Firefox v3.0.8 (the last version I had before dumping it), then you're full of shit. 1.5GB of memory use with 10 tabs, 2 add-ons (Adblock and NoScript) after 2 days of use. It also starts spiking one of my cores every 10-20 seconds or so after running for a while. The only way to "fix" it is by closing Firefox and opening it again until the resource usage builds up and you have to do it once more. This has happened on multiple computers, both desktop and laptops, old and new running Windows XP Pro, Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista x64. Opera 9.64, Chromium nightly builds and IE 8 all behave correctly with resources on these systems.

You sound just like those ignorant Firefox devs who deny all problems. Fanboys like you are yet another reason I'm glad to have left Firefox behind.

Re:Opera 10 as well

[knails]

Well I know that I don't ever see memory leak problems, and haven't since 2.5 or earlier. I regularly keep 3-10 tabs open for weeks at a time, and it rarely get to over 250MB memory usage. Though, I don't use NoScript, because it's worthless, I run at least 4 other add-ons.

Previous tests

[Rolgar]

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?

Re:Previous tests

[PitaBred]

There's actually a red line on the bottom row of what should be yellow "pixels" on the Acid2 smiley face on 3.6a1 here. Not sure why. Acid1 is perfect.

Re:Previous tests

[bunratty]

It's a problem with the Acid2 test that is exposed when a browser supports two background colors as specified by CSS3. All recent Firefox 3.6 builds seem to fail Acid2 for this reason.

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.

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[tepples]

I find the new versions of firefox are far less stable when it comes to AJAX sites.

Do AJAX sites still crash Firefox 3.0.x when you create a new profile with no add-ons? If not, you might want to try helping the Firefox team by finding which add-on causes crashes.

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean firefox is crashing? It is perfectly sta

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

My coworker has the constant random crashing issue too. Yes, he removed all traces of Firefox on his machine and reinstalled a fresh copy with no luck. It happens to me too, but not nearly as often.

Doesn't really help to file a bug report ("Firefox crashes all the time!") but with no way to reproduce it.

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[tepples]

Yes, he removed all traces of Firefox on his machine and reinstalled a fresh copy with no luck.

When you uninstall a program, the uninstaller might not remove your profile, which may contain valuable data such as your bookmarks, and the reinstallation may find the same profile from the previous installation.

Doesn't really help to file a bug report ("Firefox crashes all the time!") but with no way to reproduce it.

Can you compile a list of the sites on which it has crashed most often? Or is it a different site each time? Do they all use the same plug-in (e.g. Adobe Flash Player, Java, QuickTime)?

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want th crashes to stop.

Firefox keeps running when it crashes?

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[zzxc]

It's not normal for either Firefox 3.0.x or 3.5 beta to crash on ajax sites. If you are getting crashes, look up your crash reports and search for your crash signature on Bugzilla.

Plugin crashes (eg. flash) are among the most common, but corrupt files and spyware on Windows machines have also been known to cause them. If you are getting a specific crash that can be reproduced, either file a bug or comment on an existing bug with details.

Re:Just fix FF's stability damnit

[jesser]

You're correct that filing a "Firefox crashes all the time!" bug with no other information won't help. But you could try your luck with a stack trace in place of steps-to-reproduce. Sometimes that's enough information to understand and fix the bug. Depending on your platform, you may be able to get stack traces for your recent crashes by visiting about:crashes.

Theory, or practice?

[madamkistulot]

Even if firefox is slower than safari, or not as acidic (is that how you'd say it?) safari has so many basic problems its not even funny, beta4 and 3. Even if firefox was 25% below, and rendered twice as slowly, the fact that you could trust it to load any page you needed it to as compared to safari's "maybe!" policy... Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend not to be biased here. I know I love firefox a lot and am sort of anti-apple in some ways. But I think safari's constant website-compatibility issues that - acid or not - are ongoing is nothing to ignore.

Re:Theory, or practice?

[beelsebob]

So, which pages is it safari can't load then?

Re:Theory, or practice?

[foniksonik]

What sites don't load in Safari? You could send the list over to the Webkit team... I haven't run across any myself.

Re:Theory, or practice?

[Ash-Fox]

So, which pages is it safari can't load then?

When you login into www.online.citibank.pl and/or www.ingbank.pl, Safari doesn't work with those sites. Firefox works fine.

Re:Theory, or practice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, that's because those sites are run by POLOCKS!!!

Safari works great here in the first world.

Re:Theory, or practice?

[Brett Buck]

I am not sure what you are talking about, I have yet to find a site that won't function (if not render perfectly) with the current Safari release. Examples?

        Brett

Re:Theory, or practice?

[Ash-Fox]

Well duh, that's because those sites are run by POLOCKS!!!

Of course they did, Polish people can be found in plenty of jobs from cleaning to webdesign in every country. So you will find many, many websites are made by Polish people, not a tiny minority. Thus, this reasoning is not good enough for why Safari doesn't work on those sites.

Safari works great here in the first world.

Apparently not, Poland is classed as a first world country and those banks aren't even Polish.

Re:Theory, or practice?

[beelsebob]

That's odd, I bank with ING... their website works flawlessly in safari for me. Their security is shit, in that they require a 3rd party app that launches a webserver on my machine for me to create an unencrypted connection to, and then does god knows what with the data from there... But that doesn't stop the fact that the web site works fine in safari.

voluntary (on both sides) border closings

[Anonymous Coward]

it might help. why let greed (airlines, etc...) decide the fate of so many millions of souls, again?

Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[javacowboy]

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.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[maxume]

Firefox is "essentially a community effort" with tens of millions of dollars of income.

I'm not sure that being able to pay dozens of developers is enough to keep up, but it probably helps.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[skeletor935]

Firefox is the slowest browser I've ever used and just sits there consuming more and more memory. Safari(for mac) and Chrome (for windows) are so much faster and lighter that I can't stand firefox.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Anonymous Coward]

word. At work, I use chrome except for times I need firebug or adblock. At home, I only use firefox if I need tor button or (occasionally) firebug.

Safari and chrome both feel lightweight and snappy.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[owlnation]

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.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[beelsebob]

Huh?

WebKit: Open source project with large dollop of corporate funding.
Gecko: Open source project with large dollop of corporate funding.

What's the difference?

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Hurricane78]

Well, to me, all this rendering "better" stuff does not matter anymore. Because I can't live without my extensions.

Any browser that does not offer me *all* my extensions, is not worth those milliseconds of speed improvement, and is doomed to not getting used here, And this includes being able to easily port my self-made ones.

I'm also not trolling, as I really *really* like proper browser implementations. (I was a web application developer [think "AJAX big time, before the term was coined"] for 5 years.)
I also like Opera very much and recommend it to everyone. Much cool stuff in Firefox comes from it anyway.

But still... no AdBlock Plus, no Greasemonkey, no configurable smooth scrolling, no gestures, no Firebug, no WebDev toolbar, no ColorPicker (with Palette generator), no TagSifter, no go! Sorry.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[bruthasj]

Google is supporting Firefox as well.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hype.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[cabjf]

Funny, because both Chrome and Safari use WebKit, which is also "essentially a community effort" (branch from KHTML and KJS) with the backing of companies with billions of dollars of income and more than likely a few dozens of paid developers from each thrown in.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. Some bugs in Firefox had been reported in versions 1.x and were/are left unattended until some geek creates a exploit to take advantage of them. Then, they release an urgent security update.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[vitaflo]

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.

Adblock has been available for Safari for years now. You can get it here:

http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

A Flash block addon for Safari is also available:

http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html

While Safari doesn't have the same ease of plug-in support as Firefox, there's enough for most people who want to make the switch.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[maxume]

Are you talking about Apple and Google? I think you probably are, because they were both mentioned in the comment I replied to and part of the reason that I said "I'm not sure that being able to pay dozens of developers is enough to keep up, but it probably helps."

I wasn't saying rah rah Firefox rah, I was pointing out that "essentially a community effort" is a ridiculous characterization of Mozilla, which is actually a well funded (from their operations, not community donations) not-for-profit.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Blimey85]

The memory usage is pretty insane and I find myself having to restart it quite a bit lately. I miss the days when Firefox was lean and mean. I guess I could dump the latest version and reinstall an older one... which was the best? 1.5.x? I don't even remember anymore. I know 2 added some stuff that was cool but I don't recall if it was where the bloat really started or not.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[not already in use]

Gecko has more baggage than Madonna.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[pohl]

While Safari doesn't have the same ease of plug-in support as Firefox...

It sounds like you're actually thinking of the Firefox "extension" or "add-on" API. Both Safari and Firefox support plugins. Extensions and plugins are not the same thing. This seems to be a common mistake.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Huh? WebKit: Open source project with large dollop of corporate funding. Gecko: Open source project with large dollop of corporate funding. What's the difference?

Gecko's corporate funding is almost entirely from Google and the code comes from the Mozilla foundation and random community members.

Webkit's funding comes from Google, Apple, Nokia, Novell, and several others. Code comes from the same.

The basic difference is Gecko is pretty much funded by Google and used in Firefox. Webkit is funded by many companies and used in a wide variety of projects. This means more code shared and less work for each contributor... thus, theoretically, more time to work on new features and improvements.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[jonabbey]

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.

Firefox has always been multithreaded, just like Netscape Navigator to the beginning of time.

I assume you mean multi-process, in the same way that Chrome and/or IE8 are?

What do you want to see stripped down about it? It's already very stripped down compared to what Netscape Communicator and/or Mozilla was.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[Willbur]

I prefer ClickToFlash to many of the other flash blockers for safari:

http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master

Many safari plugins use InputManager hacks to patch safari. That can be dangerous, and I don't have the time to really check which ones are safe and which ones aren't.

In contrast, I believe that ClickToFlash is just another web plugin (the same as flash itself). It is used instead of the normal flash plugin. It displays a plain grey box. When clicked on, that grey box loads the normal flash plugin. The result is a flash blocker that works in safari using standard APIs.

Re:Safari and Chrome bound to get better?

[beelsebob]

Yep, sounds like a definite win for WebKit to me.

Ho hum, come back when they reach 100/100

[kabloom]

Why is it at all interesting that an incomplete JS implementation has gotten less incomplete? Don't bother us until they reach 100%.

Re:Ho hum, come back when they reach 100/100

[dword]

It is so interesting, because achieving 100/100 on Acid3 is extremely difficult and because you have no idea what you're talking about. Don't bother us until you know what Acid3 is 100%.

FYI, Acid3 is more than just "JS implementation"

PS: When was the last time you rolled out something that worked exactly as specified, exactly as expected and 100% of it was OK? Not even a typo in some text? Not even a missing pixel from an image? Did you also manage to roll out that product and give it away for free? Did it also end up being the second most used product of its kind in the world? Did it consist of tens of thousands of different things and they ALL had to interact with each in order for everything to work? I doubt you've managed all of these. In fact, I doubt you've managed to accomplish ANY of these, because if you did, you wouldn't be trolling on Slashdot.

PPS: The article says it's 93 but I see 94 on Acid3's Wikipedia page for Firefox 3.6a1pre.

Re:Ho hum, come back when they reach 100/100

[BZ]

> PPS: The article says it's 93 but I see 94 on Acid3's Wikipedia page for Firefox 3.6a1pre.

Sure; the article is about 3.5b4. 3.6a1pre has several months of development work on it that were not merged to the 3.5 branch (which was stabilizing instead).

Re:Ho hum, come back when they reach 100/100

[dword]

Oops! Sorry, this is Slashdot. I meant to say "the summary says..." I didn't RTFA. Thanks for the update!

Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

I have a center - right web site http://www.treatyist.com./ Most of the left leaning folks on slashdot would probably puke at it but every web developer would like this: I block IE from using the site and redirect people to a page exhorting users to upgrade to a new browser. On that page I have links to download either Google Chrome or Firefox.

I did this because of all the CSS3 items available in Chrome (webkit) and FireFox (mozilla), like rounded corners, box shadows, and multicolumn text....and honestly, I don't use IE enough when developing to even know if the site is going to work.

I get like a trickle of hits, as I have no idea what I'm doing as far as advertising myself goes. But, I can tell how many people are getting bounced because of IE by looking at my stats for the block page and it seems more like only about a 1/3 of my hits are actually getting the IE bounce, rather than the 3/4s, if we were to believe the IE stats. I think this is an ok loss because it means I don't have to worry about IE stupid stuff, and, better still, I can start to roll out content using SVG.

I just wanted to share this because I would like to see Microsoft get on the stick. While we may love or hate Obama, we can at least all agree that IE sucks, and I'm hoping that I can convince other web site developers to block IE and redirect to a download page that explains why, and recommends users to move to FireFox or Chrome.

I'll see if I can't add a public stats page online so that everyone can see the stats for the site, and see how this IE blocking experiment works.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Pvt_Ryan]

http://www.treatyist.com/ is the corrected working link. ( You had com./ )

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[MyLongNickName]

1) Your link is bad.
2) Your site isn't all that sophisticated. Yet you can't handle IE traffic? 85% of all traffic?
3) Your site does accept advertising for IE. I had a nice flash animation for IE8. If that isn't ironic, I don't know what is.
4) Your site doesn't even render properly in Firefox. Your 'digg submit' button on this page http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx hides behind the first table.
5) I love in your site how you have to scroll horizontally to see all the content.
6) And what the hell is with this page http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/comradeobamawoopspirates.aspx. I can't even CLICK on the scroll bars

So, if you are giving lectures on web design, stick it in your ear.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Blakey Rat]

Your site doesn't work in Firefox, either: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/treatvist_com.png You're probably in violation of Google's terms of use by obscuring their ad block, although I'm not 100% certain on that.

And the usability of it is GODAWFUL. Who decided it was a good idea to randomly swap copy on your homepage, thus moving its links all over the fucking place? "Oh that article looks interesting, let's click! ... Missed. Try again, click! ... Missed."

In short, maybe you shouldn't be such a snob about IE until you get your site working on at least *one* browser.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[cjjjer]

Also a guy who bitches about MS and it's technology yet uses ASP.NET.

EPIC!!!

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[dword]

Yup... this is what your website looks like running in Firefox 3 at 1024x768 (only the status bar has been removed, the scroll bars should be visible, but they aren't, because of your awful design) on my Mac with the latest updates. The pot is calling the kettle back...

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Anonymous Coward]

The domain is treatyist.com but the headline reads "The Treatvist". At page load, part of the text is hidden and the only way to read it is selecting and dragging it, because he somehow managed to hide the scrollbars behind the background image. Using ASP to block Microsoft browsers is weird. And the childish content... I'm not going there.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Tolkien]

How often do you visit your site? It's entirely non-functional with javascript completely disabled and disabling it by domain (digg.com) results in a small empty ugly box. Also is it just me or is the text on the index page changing randomly of its own accord? This is "web 1.9" at best. Yuck. Also, http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx desperately needs a redesign. Scroll-bars appear yet there is no reason to scroll. Get rid of the moving moon at the bottom.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[DivineGod]

Not defending the creator of this site but:

Using ASP.NET is not the same as liking MS or ASP.NET. He could have been forced to use it.

I am in that situation right now. And I loathe both ASP.NET and MS equally.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Mister Whirly]

So he is forced to use a MS product to punish the others who are forced to use a MS product? Makes perfect sense.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Blakey Rat]

It almost makes you wonder if it's some incredible troll, with tons of preparation time involved... especially considering the content of the site, once you do get a chance to click through to the articles.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

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.

I think that's true, but, if you have ten sites, then the leverage shifts.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

Also a guy who bitches about MS and it's technology yet uses ASP.NET.

Well, no. I bitched about an MS Browser. ASP.NET is a different product. I like Visual Studio for development.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

Thanks for looking at that on the Mac. The feedback is super. Yeah... I screwed up the scroll bar logic at low resolutions by trying to do something fancy.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

This is super feedback. Um, the ad thing on Google is because of a right aligned div competing with a left aligned block... really just need to have the whole flow go which way.

I'm still going to be a snob about IE, but fix up the bugs from the feedback I get.

The random text takes a usability hit... but I kinda like it. That will stay until more complain about it. Probably what I might do is keep the injected text a consistent width with sort of a fill in the blank look so that the positions of elements remain constant.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

I wasn't -forced- to use an MS product, but I am more familiar with asp.net. Really, I just wanted to see how the asp.net GridView does in the "real world".. not just the corporate stuff I shovel out for a living. On the flipside, just because KDE 4.0 totally sucked doesn't mean that I should just give on KDE 4.1... indeed, as bad as Ubuntu 8 with KDE 4.0 was, Ubuntu 9 with KDE 4.1 is rather nice, so much so that I'm liking Vista more.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Blakey Rat]

Why bother to run a site if you don't care about getting traffic to it?

I mean, if you're not going to remove a "usability hit" to your pages, why even have pages? It seems pointless.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Sockatume]

I don't think it's something that's particularly cumulative. It'd take an awful lot of blogs for the average Facebook- and Youtube-prowling IE user to decide to switch over, they just won't read those blogs and be happy with it. If it starts happening with major segments of the internet en masse, so that you can't (for example) get onto any blog with IE, then it'd be effective.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Anonymous Coward]

IE users are getting the better end of the deal :P

That being said, it looks like the page is properly rendered in IE! No need for more fancy browsers!

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

If its a troll, its a troll to the right wing. But, from the slashdot effect, it's just incredibly stupid short sightedness at my part. I didn't think through the response when I posted to slashdot. I was just focused on "firefox == good, ie == bad", because MS is just dragging its feet on the browser front.

Still, I have to say that the feedback posters have given about this or that feature sucks has been utterly tremendous. I'm deeply grateful to all the people that took the time to post links to the site as it looked on Macs or in different resolutions or different settings from what I have.

But, to get back to the troll thing, to some extent, contentwise, the Treatyist sorta lampoons the "hard hitting" political web site - with all the socialist occupation stuff, but, it actually tries to take an objective view in the guts of it. It's like, you read the National Review, and President Obama is a baby eating anti-christ. But, if you read the Nation, he's a child hugging friend of man and dolphin a like. And this is not based on what the man has done or not done, or even what he's done versus promised, but, based on the idea that he's a liberal versus a conservative.

So in the teeth of that, we can aggregate real numbers now, and compare those to plans, and see how a President is -really- doing. You can be a right winger and not think what he does will work, but, if President Obama and his Democrats actually reduce the trade deficit, shave unemployment, boost GDP, pretty much, the "company of the USA" profitable, then you have to say that it worked. Or not worked. Punditrocacy is unaccountable because it never holds consistent standards and that's what I want to change. But probably I won't get any hits at all.

It's like even with the carbon calculator, the animating thing there is the realism. My biggest worry is that it doesn't actually consider the economic effects of switching - it just the costs go up and assumes that people will come up with all of this money, but it doesn't actually look at , ok, people can't afford it, so they stop using a thing, driving up costs for everyone else as the capital costs remain fixed owing to complexity.

So I do all of that and I'm on a right wing site and someone posts back that, there's -nothing- man could ever do to screw up the planet, and I say, "well, what number does that mean"... like, does that mean you disagree with the tons of air in the atmosphere, tons of CO2, if so how many tons do you think people could put into the air... you just get no answer back. And similarly, on the other end, there's the lefties that think in all cases that efficiency will be better... but, that means numbers too, it means that they hope a complexity cost exponent of efficiency will be lower than the increasing price of fuel so that savings can be achieved.

It's just like, we live in a sea of absolutes, on both sides, and the world is just not that way. So, to answer that, is the treatyist, basically, designed to be radically moderate. I was thinking that I might even have a RHINO logo to represent RINOS... to get that point across.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

Thanks for the super feedback. Yeah, Javascript being disabled is going to be a problem. I kinda lean towards Javascript because I could theoretically port it all over to another server technology at some point and its more active. I mean, just imagine SaveTheEarth with a ton of postbacks. The text on the index page is changing on its own accord... I was looking for the text based visual equivalent of a newscaster jerking his head and making random movements to try and keep your attention. A lot of people hate it though. Might do it differently, or, maybe get rid of it.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

I mean, if you're not going to remove a "usability hit" to your pages, why even have pages? It seems pointless.

Oh, look at you coming at me with all that logic! That's a good point. I made the "random text blocks" fixed size so that stuff doesn't move all over the place as they change. That fixes the usability of the links - don't move out from under you. Although, there's still the text changing.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[skeeto]

You embarrassed him about it so much he took his page down!

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

If you have ten good sites, then yes. If Amazon, google, facebook, Yahoo, ebay,wikipedia, youtube, flickr,cnn, nytimes all refuse a specific browser, then THAT is leverage my friend.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[FrameRotBlues]

I visit a lot of electrical component websites like General Electric, Phoenix Contact and Mouser Electronics. I run FF 3.0.x and NoScript and have sites' scripts disallowed by default. So, when I go to visit a new site that hasn't been whitelisted, it's expected that I will see what I want, but clicking links and searching using a built-in search bar won't function correctly until I whitelist it or temporarily allow it. When I went to visit your site, I didn't see anything except some odd-sized frames. It looked like a very simple site that was built using wrong-sized frames, and I didn't even think to allow scripting. I know absolutely nothing about website design, but if you can build the frames before using scripts in the frames, that would at least allow people using NoScript to see what they've wandered onto.

To me, having basic HTML functioning of a site is much more important than Flash and other script goodies. Make the site work using basic HTML, then add the scripts to do all the cool things. JMHO. Also, any Flash-heavy or Flash-dependent sites at least give me a warning that I need to install the current version of Flash in order to properly view the site. That's my cue as a user to temporarily allow the site. Hope this helps for your feedback.

Re:Just block IE from your site.

[tjstork]

Hope this helps for your feedback.

Immensely, thank you.

Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[tepples]

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?

Acid2 already looks fine in the latest general release version of Mozilla Firefox.

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a different definition of "fine" than I do, then, since in my Firefox 3.0.10, the smiley is missing its eyes and has a red box over them instead.

Close, but not quite there yet.

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously running NoScript, or some other filtering extensions. Either disable the extension or add an exception for the content referenced by the Acid2 test page. After you do that Firefox will pass just fine.

And in the future, how about you spend a few seconds checking your test environment rather than assuming the fault lies elsewhere?

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[Anonymous Coward]

Acid2 doesn't use JavaScript, so NoScript will have no effect.

But nice try.

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[BrokenHalo]

All of the acid tests stipulate that they are to be tested with the browser at its default settings.

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Acid2 doesn't use JavaScript, so NoScript will have no effect.

But nice try.

I haven't examined the code, but you must be incorrect as I use Firefox 3.0.10 here, and I just blocked scripts from webstandards.org, ran the Acid 2 test, and found that the eyes didn't render and there was a red box in their place. I then allowed webstandards.org again, the page auto-refreshed, and the eyes appeared. So it seems Acid2 does use JavaScript, it's breaking the test, and you need to place the site on your whitelist.

Re:Acid2 already looks fine in Fx 3.0.10

[AberBeta]

NoScript blocks more than just scripts, it will block data: URLs, iframes, etc.
I think you'll find the eyes are data: URLS.

Opera 10 gets a 100 and it's only an alpha

[AnonGCB]

Opera 10 got this done months ago. This isn't news until it gets 100 consistently.

Does this really matter?

[mc1138]

Don't get me wrong, standards compliance is important, but does anyone care that a firefox pre release is scoring better? Its not a full release so any of that could change, better or worse, plus as some people have pointed out there are already browsers doing better? Let me know when something actually happens.

Re:Does this really matter?

[maxume]

ACID3 doesn't really impact anything, nor does ACID2, as developers (that cater to the general market) still need to target some mix of Firefox 2 and IE 6/7 anyway.

Re:Does this really matter?

[mc1138]

That's an even bigger point, I was just talking about a beta of a browser doing better on the test, not the tests themselves, but I haven't heard of anyone having to switch a browser because it didn't pass an acid test...

Re:Does this really matter?

[Chrisq]

I haven't heard of anyone having to switch a browser because it didn't pass an acid test...

You don't know any real geeks then.

Re:Does this really matter?

[mc1138]

Real geeks use text based browsing.

Re:Does this really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know you like ASCII pron.

Re:Does this really matter?

[Mister Whirly]

You can pry my Lynx from my cold, dead, geek fingers.

Re:Does this really matter?

[Chrisq]

I didn't know you like ASCII pron.

No he's into the multi-ethnic stuff; Unicode porn.

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.

Re:Does this really matter?

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

What? You act like HTML wasn't intended to be a WYSIWYG presentation and GUI application platform but some kind of markup language describing the semantics of your document so that a browser can render it in some theoretically arbitrary, but meaningful and readable way.

Next you'll be telling me fat clients are on the way out.

Re:Does this really matter?

[shutdown -p now]

Try browsing with a larger default font for example, 99% webpages break, some worse then other, but pretty much all of them break.

For the most part, it's the problem with the way specific sites are designed, not with browsers themselves.

Also, some browsers have got a "fit to width" button that helps sometimes. Opera has had it for a while, but I think I've also seen it in Chrome recently.

here is other stuff that is annoying, for example the lack of build in support for link tags introduces in HTML2

Again, Opera has had it for a long time in form of a "link bar" - toolbar which recognizes the standard set of <link> elements, and displays them on top of the page as buttons. It used to be enabled by default in v7, but I think they've hidden it by default, since apparently users found it confusing, and, worse, inconsistent (because too many sites don't bother with such links). It can still be restored via customize toolbars dialog.

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

I don't see how they could possibly do that while remaining conformant with HTML and CSS. If the latter requires text layout to produce overlapped text, then that's pretty much it.

Instead, how about educating the web designers to use proper reflowing layouts?

Re:Does this really matter?

[grumbel]

For the most part, it's the problem with the way specific sites are designed, not with browsers themselves.

Given that close to all non-trivial pages break, I doubt it. I think there are two core problems, one is that image size continue to be given in pixel instead of 'em', as most browsers are pretty bad at scaling images, thus the page layout stays rather inflexible. The other problem is that CSS doesn't have a proper way to know the size of the content its formating, so every specification of size in the CSS makes assumption about the content that no longer hold true when the font size changes, leading to overflowing boxes and all kinds of misery. Which of course relates to the problem of CSS based layout being extremely hacky compared to past table based layouts. With table based layouts its completly trivial to place to boxes horizontally next to each other with zero risk of accidental overlap, with CSS based layouts on the other side its a complete crazy hack-fest of overlapping boxes, hard coded margins and a whole bunch of other illogical crap and that is even considered "good practice", *yuck*. I would wish that CSS would allow to define layout tablets in the CSS files, thus getting rid of all the crazy hackery and still having that semantic/layout separation.

I don't see how they could possibly do that while remaining conformant with HTML and CSS. If the latter requires text layout to produce overlapped text, then that's pretty much it.

Well, the whole point is that it shouldn't be conformant, as neither of those standards guarantees good readability. I want a button that toggles between standard conform layout and readable layout. Look at the Readability script, its truly awesome, it strips out all the navigation bars, advertisements and all other distracting crap, leaving only the raw article content of a webpage, well formated with proper margins, font size and all. Its not perfect, as it doesn't work with all webpages, but when it works it improves the readability of a webpage a hell of a lot. The whole crux with browsers is that they are only good for viewing webpages, not reading them.

Instead, how about educating the web designers to use proper reflowing layouts?

The only "proper" layout is that decided by the user.

Re:Does this really matter?

[shutdown -p now]

I think there are two core problems, one is that image size continue to be given in pixel instead of 'em', as most browsers are pretty bad at scaling images, thus the page layout stays rather inflexible.

Any kind of bitmap scaling is going to look ugly for small non-integral factors (like 1.5x), which are typical when you zoom. The only thing that would solve this is adoption of SVG.

The other problem is that CSS doesn't have a proper way to know the size of the content its formating, so every specification of size in the CSS makes assumption about the content that no longer hold true when the font size changes, leading to overflowing boxes and all kinds of misery.

Of course you can still define CSS sizes in 'em's, which gives some guarantees with respect to proportionality to actual font size. But then, also, the proper solution is not not specify fixed value size at all, and just let it size to content as needed (possibly with a nudge of min-width/height to not let it collapse completely).

That said, I agree that something like a grid-layout mechanism as seen in most desktop UI toolkits out there would be nice.

Re:Does this really matter?

[grumbel]

Any kind of bitmap scaling is going to look ugly for small non-integral factors (like 1.5x), which are typical when you zoom. The only thing that would solve this is adoption of SVG.

An easy fix would be to provide highres images and then scale those down, instead of providing lowres images and then trying to scale them up, but for that to work without wasting bandwidth you would need an image format that supports something like mipmaps and allows to only download the lower res part. Given how long it takes for an image format to be adopted, I consider that however unlikely to happen in the near future.

Re:Does this really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. You're joking, but it's important to note that Acid3 (and, in fact, Acid2 and even Acid1) is not about HTML as much as about CSS (and, in Acid3, Javascript and other things that are related to HTML and web browsing without actually being HTML).

The problem the GP is describing, while real, is not a problem with HTML, or even CSS or anything, it's ultimately a problem with what people want to do. And like it or not, but a significant number of people DO want pixel-perfect layout - so why shouldn't they be given the ability to do that?

The GP is essentially saying that because what others want doesn't match what HE wants, those others shouldn't be able to do what they want in the first place. I tend to agree that websites that break when you change things like the default font-size etc. suck, but what he's advocating is not a solution. You don't ban hammers because it's possible to hit your thumb with them.

Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Wrath0fb0b]

I hate when web developers use meta-redirect tags to make it impossible to use the back button to get to the previous page because it just sends you forward again. Sometimes you can hit back fast enough to race the redirect, but that's just silly -- I shouldn't have to fight against my software. At the very minimum, put a 3 second wait on it (with a link for the impatient) or, better yet, set a cookie so that if I revisit on the way back within a short period of time it won't redirect.

Another solution occurs to me on the browser-side, the browser could just not add pages that are redirected-to to the history. That would also preserve the intuitive function of the back button.

Sorry for the off-topic rant but it just bugs the shit out of me. Carry on ...

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[RebelWebmaster]

In the advanced options, under the general tab, you can have Firefox warn you about automatic redirects with an information bar instead of just going. Yeah, it's a bit of a workaround to the problem, but you may find it useful.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[cyber-vandal]

Agreed. People who insist on this incredibly obnoxious behaviour should be beaten to within an inch of their lives.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Anonymous Coward]

Most browsers display a drop down on the back button that lets you choose which page in the history you want to go to. If not, there is a history menu item somewhere. Why don't you just skip over the last page and go to the one before it?

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[JVolkman]

Assuming you're using Firefox, click the down arrow next to the "back" button and select the page you want.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Right! Do you not know how to right click on back button?

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate when web developers put a fucking useless 3 second (or more, especially on some download redirects, and I'm not talking about Rapidsharelike sites) redirect wait on pages when they could just redirect it immediately. As others have noted, there is a Back history, use it.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[tepples]

Do you not know how to right click on back button?

For owners of some Apple brand notebook computers, right-clicking involves plugging in an external mouse.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Wrath0fb0b]

Not taking my hands off the keyboard is a big plus. Alt+back is 10 times faster than move hand to mouse, move mouse to menu, select item, move mouse to item.

Having to go the menu is a huge PITA.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Do you not know how to right click on back button?

For owners of some Apple brand notebook computers, right-clicking involves plugging in an external mouse.

It's called "chording" or it's "multitouch". If you're using a notebook without an external mouse, you're using a trackpad. Unlike mice, trackpads have a usability benefit from chording or multitouch. It's faster to leave two fingers on the trackpad and click then it is to move my other hand so my thumb can get to the second trackpad button. It's faster to hit option while clicking on the back button (because my fingers are already on the keyboard) than it is to move my other hand off the keyboard to hit the second trackpad button or stretch my thumb that far.

The only real drawback, which is significant one, is users have to learn how to use these features... but then anyone nerdy enough to be on Slashdot should not have an issue there.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[owlstead]

How can you use the history? The pages generally have no title or the exact same title as the one I'm trying to jump to. The only thing after that is jumping out of the site entirely. And if the site is only for browsing purposes, that's exactly what I'll do.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[broen]

Well, that's true -- I suppose someone somewhere might have a broken control key.

Re:Just a random pet-peeve that came up here --

[Anonymous Coward]

why just within an inch?

96/100 with svg.smil.enabled set to true

[bunratty]

Firefox 3.6 builds score 96/100 when you set the preference svg.smil.enabled to true because tests 75 and 76 require SMIL in SVG. You can find the four tests that Firefox 3.6 still doesn't pass on the Acid3 spreadsheet.

Re:96/100 with svg.smil.enabled set to true

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's still 94/100.

FF and AJAX sites

[viralMeme]

"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

What sites exactly?

Re:FF and AJAX sites

[FrameRotBlues]

I'm not him, but I know that I get AJAX errors on Facebook. They're infrequent, but this is the only site I've ever seen them on.

Does reaching 100%

[tepples]

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.

Re:Does reaching 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, Mozilla is using native rendering on the various platforms to do their TrueType rendering (each OS has per-application private font APIs available) - which btw, is already in the current beta release. There's no need to do custom rendering, though on Windows that would be nice (Windows type rendering is ugly).

Re:Does reaching 100%

[hixie]

In a word, no.

Really?

[Gordo_1]

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.

Re:Really?

[palmerj3]

Seriously, that news was so 3.1.15 pre-alpha!

Re:Really?

[drinkypoo]

You know, it's kind of ironic that IE helped to ruin the web by supporting fancy new features over compliance and what is Firefox doing? Making Javascript faster instead of working on SVG fonts, a feature that we desperately need to get rid of stupid hacks like sIFR (which is still better than dynamically generated image headlines, whose text is not selectable.)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

>As I appear into my crystal ball

WTF?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need to eliminate stuff like sIFR is not specifically SVG fonts. It's font embedding in general.

What we need, ideally, is some way to specify in CSS the URL to use for a particular font, and for the browser to download and use the font.

Maybe something like this:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/@font-face

Oh look, that's supported in Firefox as of 3.5, Safari from 3.1, and Opera 10.

Now all we need is for the mess over font formats to be sorted out, so that we can actually use the damned things.

Re:Really?

[drinkypoo]

Now all we need is for the mess over font formats to be sorted out, so that we can actually use the damned things.

Also, I want a pony.

Re:Really?

[Gordo_1]

Weird, I must have proofread it half a dozen times. I guess it sounded right in my head, so I didn't catch the obvious misspelling.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

acid3 isn't a "standard"

Re:Really?

[BitZtream]

Acid doesn't test svg in any meaningful way, the font problem is not related to SVGs. I work with SVGs on a regular basis and what firefox calls SVG support is roughly as good as IE 2.0's support for HTML 4 and css.

If you added real SVG testing to Acid all browsers would fail horribly.

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

[orsty3001]

So it's kind of like the Special Olympics.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[dkh2]

Actually, I'd call it the Un-Special Olympics.

Participants in the actual Special Olympics are ALL winners by virtue of the fact that they not only put their best foot forward EVERY DAY but they routinely outperform our expectations.

IE, on the other hand, seldom puts forward a best effort and routinely falls short of expectation for a company that touts itself a fervent supporter of published standards. When IE actually supports the standards it helped to establish it will score 100/100 on the Acid test.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it would be like the Special Olympics if everyone got a metal or if everyone ran supriseingly fast but in a funny handicapped kinda way.

I think we've identified the flaw in your failed plan:
1) Make flawed analogy about performance tests.
2) Mention something easily made fun such as "Special Olympics"
3) ...
4) Humor

Maybe you change step 2 to repeatedly shouting "Boobies!" while jumping around in your underwear with a bra on your head. That would definitely be funnier (albeit more disturbing).

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[orsty3001]

I usually resort to poo or pee jokes because you know ca ca and pee pee are ha ha and he he. Just trying something different and I'm glad I was able to offend. :)

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:Acid tests are not a race

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not.

It's the popularity of the browser in last place. (Not the browser itself. Who cares if Epiphany scores 1 on the ACID test, for example.)

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[BrokenHalo]

Firstly, no, it's not like the Special Olympics. Also it apparently it makes a difference what platform you are running. I just tried the OS X version of 3.5b4 and it scored 92 vs. the XP version's 93.

I have never found that such acid tests reveal any show-stoppers likely to totally ruin my life as I know it. I realise that browsers should strive to be as standards-compliant as possible - and to that end the acid tests are a great diagnostic tool - but for the most part, so long as webpages render well enough to be comprehensible, I can get by. I am well aware that both Safari and Opera are reputed to score 100, but neither of those browsers are adequate for me. I have grown accustomed to having the zotero, adblock and flashblock extensions, and I no longer care to do without them.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[danieltdp]

Maybe you change step 2 to repeatedly shouting "Boobies!"

And step 4 to "...profit!"

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[GreyWolf3000]

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.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[ArsonSmith]

So, you're saying it's like the difference between cheering that a mentally disabled person crossed a finish line in a 100m race, or cheering an otherwise mentally healthy adult for getting up from his world of warcraft and throwing his pile of empty mountain dew cans in the trash can?

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[BrokenHalo]

WTF? If that's your idea of an analogy, maybe you should just go back to sleep.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[dgatwood]

IMHO, it's a lot easier to just do it the way we used to do it. Put the content in a table and use background images for the border. Tile the non-corner pieces in the appropriate direction using background-repeat.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[ArsonSmith]

Sorry, I'll try to phrase it in the form of a car analogy next time.

Re:Acid tests are not a race

[foxylad]

"...Put the content in a table..." STOP RIGHT THERE! Don't you know that tables are right up there with Windows on the geek hate list?

Instead thou shalt wrangle CSS in mind-bendingly un-intuitive ways, lest thou confuse mortal souls with tr and td tags. Sigh...

this looks like a bigger problem

[nimbius]

than just firefox...i tried it in Lynx and i cant get it to pass at all...

Re:this looks like a bigger problem

[zigmeister]

Ya neither does e-links, I think it's a worldwide conspiracy against text only browsers. They're afraid of the superior ASCII rendering:)

middle clicking to close last tab

[viralMeme]

"That is good but in the latest b4 they have disabled closing the windows by middleclicking the last tab, it now defaults to noop"

FF 3.5b4 seem to work here for middle clicking to close last tab. Does anyone else have the same problem?

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[bemymonkey]

Middle clicking to close tabs works fine here as well... which is a good thing, because i've disabled the close button :D

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[Pvt_Ryan]

Just open a new browser so you only have 1 tab. Now middle click on that tab. Pre b4 that would close that instance of FF. Now it does nothing (assuming you have "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" set to true)

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[Pvt_Ryan]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486393 (one of the bug reports. there are several (open and closed) if you search for closeWindowWithLastTab in bugzilla.

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[viralMeme]

"Just open a new browser so you only have 1 tab. Now middle click on that tab. Pre b4 that would close that instance of FF. Now it does nothing (assuming you have "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" set to true)"

I'm not sure how this is a bug. By default it won't close the last Windows. If you set closeWindowWithLastTab to false, it closes the window and opens up a new blank one.

--
trawl.bugzilla.troll.slashdot

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[Nutria]

because i've disabled the close button

How do you disable that button?

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[myspace-cn]

It's a bug cause the browser freaking disappears.

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[Pvt_Ryan]

because if it is set to true the window does not close. It does nothing.. Pre b4 it did close the window.

Re:middle clicking to close last tab

[bemymonkey]

browser.tabs.closeButtons in about:config

Garbage collection

[tepples]

Presumably the test should take about the same time to run each time, right?

One of the 100 tests is JavaScript garbage collection. A garbage collector that uses tracing without reference counting isn't necessarily guaranteed to finish in a given amount of time.

Firefox 3.6a1pre...

[Anonymous Coward]

... gets a 94. Seems like SVG is the least of their worries.

We all take a performance hit on test 69

[tsalmark]

It's harder to concentrate with that particular feed back loop.

Re: Firefox Beta Score 93 On Acid3 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

And what in hell is this good new? Wake me up when it hits 100.

Wow - I never new you could do that

[Chrisq]

I just tried it!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone

Got perfect score.

[alergia]

I had a 100 score with 3.5beta4. Everytime I did the test and really fast.

Because we run Linux

[jonaskoelker]

Didn't Google Chrome 2.0.176.0 get a 100/100, and Opera 10.0? Why do we care

$ apt-get install chrome
fail
$ apt-get install opera
fail
$ apt-get install firefox
You win an intarnets

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.

Re:Because we run Linux

[reashlin]

Not only that but Opera provide a repository for Ubuntu anyway. So not having Opera available is just poor config.

Re:Because we run Linux

[not already in use]

Must suck, really, that the @gnu.org in your email address forces you to use inferior software in the name of religion.

Re:Because we run Linux

[s0l1dsnak3123]

The reason why it's failing is because you're not logged in as root - apt-get needs root access, my friend ;)

Re:Because we run Linux

[owlstead]

Depends. Google is promising chrome for Win2k and Linux for a while now. But is still only delivers for XP and Vista, even if people already made it work for 2K.

I'd have no problems running Chrome on my Ubuntu install, but Google is seriously messing this up. This also means that I won't run it on Windows, I'm not going to invest in any browser that does not run on all my PC's.

Re:Because we run Linux

[BrokenHalo]

In any case, how hard is it to unzip a binary tarball and stick it in /usr/local?

Re:Because we run Linux

[shutdown -p now]

$ apt-get install opera
fail

Opera is one of those few vanishingly rare cases where a commercial closed-source application vendor provides packages for a very large variety of distributives, in format preferred on those distributives. For Debian, they have a full-fledged repository covering all Debian releases starting from 2.2 ("potato").

They also have x86, amd64, and ppc varieties of most package formats. You can see the full set for yourself.

Re:Because we run Linux

[GreyWolf3000]

Firebug, yslow and colorpicker make firefox an epic win for me over safari on OS X. Haven't tried Opera, and I hear they have something similar to firebug, but still.. firefox is still king for web developers at least.

Re:Because we run Linux

[tjonnyc999]

Dragonfly = Firebug (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_opera.asp)... well, kinda. But it's a step in the right direction.
Right on point with YSlow.
ColorZilla > ColorPicker IMHO
Also check out "Web Developer" by Chris Pederick - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60.

Opera's "shiny stuff" is nice, but for srs business - FF FTW.

Re:Because we run Linux

[crowne]

I'm quite impressed with Pixel Perfect http://www.pixelperfectplugin.com/

Re:Because we run Linux

[thetoadwarrior]

Opera is on Linux though.

Re:Because we run Linux

[beelsebob]

Ever tried Safari's built in Web Inspector? It's miles better than Firebug. I've no experience with your other two plugins though.

Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[tepples]

You have a different definition of "fine" than I do, then, since in my Firefox 3.0.10, the smiley is missing its eyes and has a red box over them instead.

Apparently the Acid2 on webstandards.org Acid2 on acidtests.org behave differently. Acid2 on webstandards.org renders instantly, but Acid2 on acidtests.org has a red box until the "Connecting to damowmow.com"/"Waiting for damowmow.com" disappears from the status bar, and then the red box is replaced with eyes. But given the slow response time and intermittent timeouts of the version on acidtests.org today, I think acidtests.org might be slashdotted.

Re:Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[mathx314]

Not only that, the one on acidtests.org was linked from a front-page Wikipedia article, so that's two major sites linking to it in 24 hours.

Re:Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the firefox 3.0.10 and both sites display fully... What's the problem?

Re:Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[ConceptJunkie]

If the only appropriate down mod is -1, Overrated, don't mod!

Overrated and underrated are metamods and have no business being moderation types. But I don't expect that to ever change.

Re:Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[tepples]

I have the firefox 3.0.10 and both sites display fully... What's the problem?

Both displayed fully for me. The problem is that (based on the posting times) I visited the site two hours before you, when acidtests.org was busier, and I ran into response time problems.

Re:Might slashdottings affect Acid2 results?

[knails]

We really need Unfunny and Incorrect moderations.

Pixel-for-pixel rendering vs. console browsers?

[jonaskoelker]

It struck me:

If your rendering is only correct if it matches pixel-for-pixel the benchmark rendering, does this mean that console browsers[1] can't be standards compliant? I'm no web developer; what's the exact significance of the Acid test? Surely you can offer the same ecmascript feature as everyone else, and ignore the css and have something that works?

[1] such as lynx, elinks, w3m-mode

Re:Pixel-for-pixel rendering vs. console browsers?

[Chatterton]

Console browser can be standard compliant (HTML, perhaps ECMAScript). Just not CSS compliant. Acid3 test HTML, ECMASCript and CSS as the standards.

Re:Pixel-for-pixel rendering vs. console browsers?

[Ragzouken]

They can't comply with the standards of graphical web browsers, no.

Re:Pixel-for-pixel rendering vs. console browsers?

[not already in use]

does this mean that console browsers[1] can't be standards compliant?

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

I'm no web developer; what's the exact significance of the Acid test?

To make sure things render consistently across browsers, to make sure js behaves consistently across browsers.

Surely you can offer the same ecmascript feature as everyone else, and ignore the css and have something that works?

I can't even begin to wonder how this would work. Why would you even want this? A text browser is a text browser, as the web evolves it is becoming more irrelevant as the web becomes more interactive.

Re:Pixel-for-pixel rendering vs. console browsers?

[CastrTroy]

Which brings up another important point. Even changing the DPI on the browser makes things move around quite a bit. How do these ACID tests handle cases where the user has changed from the default DPI, or even simpler, just turned up the text size. The point of browsers isn't really to be pixel perfect. Because users may change things like font sizes to fit their own preferences anyway.

About Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding how Apple works I won't be surprise if someone find the majority of the bloated code in Safari is just to get a 100 Acid Test Score.
Seriously how can a web browser be so big?

Very annoying change from Firefox 3.5b3 to b4

[Is0m0rph]

By default it changes the shutdown to clear all cookies. b3 I had clear history only, after the upgrade to b4 it wiped all the cookies out so I needed to log back in to everything. Very annoying, looking at the bug report for it I see some of the devs actually think this is fine to change those settings from b3 to b4 with no warning to users.

Re:Very annoying change from Firefox 3.5b3 to b4

[Chatterton]

They are beta. They are not for general consumption. If you have actually taken care to read the changelogs you will have see it.

Re:Very annoying change from Firefox 3.5b3 to b4

[Is0m0rph]

Sorry I didn't RTFCL. I just upgraded and when it reloaded they were gone. Next time I will RTFCL before clicking yes to upgrade hehe. I don't need to be explained to what a beta is. Thanks for your concern though.

Honestly it all comes down to the extensions

[areusche]

I have no desire to ever use Safari. Why you ask? Sure it's incredibly compliant but what good is browsing the web without ad block?

I have no desire to ever go back to the days of ad cluttering up and slowing down websites. Sure there are those nifty little host edits that you can do in Safari to block some ads, but for the most part firefox wins out.

Until there is a robust adblock like program for Safari, firefox will always be my bread and butter.

EDIT: Almost spoke too soon, but I found a good adblock safari clone. I can't get it to work for some reason though http://pimpmysafari.com/plugins/adblock

Re:Honestly it all comes down to the extensions

[zero-point-infinity]

Privoxy works just fine for me. I rather prefer having a browser-independent ad blocking solution. It's one less feature to worry about when 'shopping' around for browsers and as someone who uses more than one browser it means only having to manage one filter list, not two or four or whatever.

Re:Honestly it all comes down to the extensions

[Dansteeleuk]

It's not that good then. :D

Re:Honestly it all comes down to the extensions

[Ash-Fox]

Privoxy works just fine for me.

The only problem with Privoxy is, it isn't as easy to use at all. Adding whitelists, blacklisted sites, fixes parameters is easy with no script or adblockplus, in Privoxy it requires studying the file configuration formats among other things.

Now, I may be well competent enough to use Privoxy, but setting it up is a royal pain in the ass (default rules break so much stuff), adding/deleting rules is a pain in the ass too. For most users, browser centric blocking support of such things is easier, faster and more efficient.

Now, if you were running a network.. That's another story.

93 on Xp, 91 on RHEL 5

[anghelcovici]

I've just tested 3.5b4 on RHEL 5 and I get 91/100

Firefox for users without a root password?

[tepples]

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.

I believe that's called End 6.

That gets the same message across without costing you any readership

Except that portion of who browses the web on computers that they do not own. If you're a limited user, you may not have the privilege to modify C:\Windows or C:\Program Files or to run any program not in those folders. Limited users at home might be everybody but the head of the household; limited users at work might be everybody but executives and the IT department; limited users at a public library might be patrons.

Re:Firefox for users without a root password?

[Anonymous Coward]

everybody but the head of the household

How very quaint...

Re:Firefox for users without a root password?

[Sockatume]

I'm not following how this plan is an inconvenience for people who can't change browser for whatever reason, or simply decline to. They can just ignore the message.

Re:Firefox for users without a root password?

[tepples]

I'm not following how this plan is an inconvenience for people who can't change browser for whatever reason

With or without the message, a user sees how unusably broken the site is, decides that he can't change browser, and (here's the important part) switches to a competing site that does cater to obsolete browsers.

Re:Firefox for users without a root password?

[onefriedrice]

Then presumably they can complain to their heads of household, etc. to finally get their software upgraded.

Windows 9x is dead

[tepples]

developers (that cater to the general market) still need to target some mix of Firefox 2 and IE 6/7 anyway.

I thought Firefox 2 autoupdated to Firefox 3 for everyone except users of old versions of Windows (98, Me) and Mac OS X (pre-Tiger). I also thought IE 6 autoupdated to IE 7 and now 8 for everyone except users of old versions of Windows (pre-XP). What portion of the general market runs Windows 9x again?

Re:Windows 9x is dead

[maxume]

There are massive corporate installs of IE6, and if IE7 is auto-updated to IE8, it hasn't happened to me yet. It carries a glorious citation needed tag, but Wikipedia says that IE6 still has almost a 20% share:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Market_adoption_and_usage_share

Firefox 2 does appear to be nearly irrelevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#Market_adoption

Even if you assume that the real world is composed of IE8 and FF3, ACID3 is still irrelevant to web developers and browser users (but it has worked quite well as a fun game for web browser developers).

Re:Windows 9x is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

"I thought Firefox 2 autoupdated to Firefox 3 for everyone except users of old versions of Windows (98, Me) and Mac OS X (pre-Tiger)."

Nope, it doesn't - at least not on my eee pc 900 default install. And, according to some googling I did, also not on a lot of other people's eee pc's.

Re:Windows 9x is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

upgrading IE7 to IE8 in a corporate is no easy thing. You have lots of internal websites which will break and nobody will want to spend the money needed to have them fixed(and, yes, big corporates who are not in the IT field don't have internal developers for this kind of thing).

Corporates will cling to IE6 and 7 for years, and this is mainly microsoft's own fault.

You might need a political dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "center-right" refers to right-leaning moderates. Based on the content of your site, you are not even remotely center-right. In fact, I think that most objective people would classify you as right-wing, or possibly even fringe-right.

On a related note, why are the right-wingers trying to paint themselves as mainstream centrists these days? It's transparently disingenuous, and makes it seem like you're embarrassed of your own political ideology.

This is not news.

[Arancaytar]

The development branch of Firefox was on 93 half a year ago.

Re:This is not news.

[nicodoggie]

Heh, I clicked the headline just to post something like this... Firefox 3.5 hit 93 somewhere in the late Alphas, if IIRC (it was still 3.1 then).

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:Freetype and Apple patents

[Nick Ives]

Whether or not Apple is currently suing is not the point, the point is they could sue. That's the same reason that people are wary of Mono: Microsoft won't make a promise that they won't ever sue over the patents that Mono infringes, the promise they have made is limited (I can't remember the details).

Mono is actually in a better position than FreeType because Mono has that limited covenant whereas Apple hasn't made a similar promise WRT FreeType.

Remember GIF?

Stop slashdotting acid tests

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to run it and hitting F5 every 5 seconds starts to get tiresome. Just stop it, I want in!!11noe

iBrowser and adBrowser

[Anonymous Coward]

The iBrowser and the adBrowser are limited by their respective owners' economic interests. Google wants their browser to work with Google sites and display advertisements. Apple wants their browser to bring people further into the closed circle of Apple products: Safari to iTunes to (eventually) a Mac. Firefox will always have a market among those who don't like those limitations.

How to light the fire. :)

[Benanov]

Sounds like a good way to encourage fixes. :)

FF clears all cookies at shutdown

[viralMeme]

"By default it changes the shutdown to clear all cookies"

No it doesn't, I just logged into Slashdot, visited Youtube and set default location, then shutdown and restarted. I'm still logged into Slashdot and Youtube no longer prompts for 'Suggested Country Filter'.

Mod Parent Down

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of fucked joke is that? I wish I had mod points.

Re:Mod Parent Down

[orsty3001]

I don't like that language, this is a family website.

Re:Mod Parent Down

[danieltdp]

family website?! I would NEVER let my kids close to slashdot! I only visit slashdot in the middle of the night, with my doors looked. Are you insane!? :-)

Re:Mod Parent Down

[Matt Perry]

I don't like that language, this is a family website.

Which family? The Addams Family?

Re:Mod Parent Down

[tsalmark]

Middle of the work day is safer, kids can't wander in unnoticed, unless you work and home school at the same time. Also this leave more free free time at night.

Re:Mod Parent Down

[danieltdp]

To get porn!

Re:Mod Parent Down

[Anonymous Coward]

I am your kid you insensitive clod!

Safari 4 beta

[Rich2k]

Safari 4 beta already reaches 100/100 as does Opera.

FF and SVG fonts

[viralMeme]

"what is Firefox doing? Making Javascript faster instead of working on SVG fonts"

It says here on this Mozilla SVG Project site that Firefox can render SVG fonts since version 1.5
--
trawl.bugzilla.troll.slashdot

Re:FF and SVG fonts

[guest]

The text on the page you linked to says:

"Big areas of the SVG specification where we're still lacking include filters, svg defined fonts, and declarative animations."

how fast is fast

[viralMeme]

"I never understood why did they include speed in a browser test?"

To compare how fast different browsers render on the same machine.

"it would mean that the best browsers would fail on a slower computer, and the worst would pass on a faster one. This is not objective"

I do believe they meant you to compare browsers on the same machine.

"If the web developers have use decent and modest scripting, it will go faster, if they created inefficient monsters, it is going to crawl"

I do believe they meant you to compare the same site on the differing browsers on the same machine, like the ACID test.

"In related news, I've run Midori on a slow Neo 1973, and it passes ACID 3. I found that surprising"

Do you have a screen capture of Midori running ACID 3?

Chrome 2 as well

[bunratty]

You can keep track of how well all the browsers do on Acid3 by watching the Acid3 browsershots or the Acid3 Wikipedia article.

Whom Apple might sue other than FT

[tepples]

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.

Re:Whom Apple might sue other than FT

[kabloom]

I'm going to venture to guess that even if it doesn't, but it's close enough, we can consider that passing. Remember, the Acid1 test gave an explicit exception "All 100%-conformant CSS1 agents should be able to render the document elements above this paragraph indistinguishably (to the pixel) from this reference rendering, (except font rasterization and form widgets)." While I imagine the font rasterization requirements for Acid3 are more stringent (since a font is provided), close-enough counts when dealing with patented portions of TrueType font specifications.

My Acid Test

[jameseyjamesey]

My Acid Test Does it have adblock? Does it have mouse gestures? Firefox gets a 100%. I don't know about the others.

Re:My Acid Test

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Opera gets 100% on your acid test (in fact, the first browser to hit either benchmark). It also gets 100% on the Acid3 benchmark. So, why compromise?

Acid1 and Acid2 results

[bunratty]

You can see how well all browsers perform on Acid1 by watching the Acid1 browsershots.

You can see how well all browsers perform on Acid2 by watching the Acid2 browsershots or the Acid2 Wikipedia article.

Acid2 results

[bunratty]

Oops... I posted the wrong link to the Acid2 browsershots.

69...

[Valtor]

...and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)

That's because it's worth taking our time when we do 69. ;-)

Valtor

Acid4

[CopaceticOpus]

I think there should be an Acid 4 test, and it should go in a different direction.

1. Open about 30 tabs with various types of content, including Ajax heavy pages. Use these tabs regularly for three days.

2. Test number 1: Open a new tab and play a YouTube video. It should load quickly and play without stuttering.

3. Test number 2: Close all tabs. Check the browser memory usage. It should be the same as when the browser was first loaded before any pages were open.

What's not good enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why is the rum gone?

Google's strategy

[hessian]

Google's strategy was brilliant: fund Mozilla in order to hurt Microsoft. Then, once the damage was done, launch their own competitor to gain market share.

Their next step: Google products will work with any browser, but there will be special features only Chrome can support.

Sound familiar? Apple's doing it with Safari, and it's how Microsoft marketed IE initially. History repeats itself.

I am going to continue to use Firefox. Opera is the best solution but like a BMW it's high-maintenance with frequent crashes. Safari is a neurotic product by a neurotic company, so even if it's ahead this round, in the long term I don't want to be a user. Chrome is out because I don't want to be part of someone's marketing strategy until it's clear what the end goal is. But Firefox is stable, does 90% of what I want 90% correctly 90% of the time, so for a browser it's awesome.

Re:Google's strategy

[blind biker]

Google's strategy was brilliant: fund Mozilla in order to hurt Microsoft. Then, once the damage was done, launch their own competitor to gain market share.

Their next step: Google products will work with any browser, but there will be special features only Chrome can support.

Sound familiar? Apple's doing it with Safari, and it's how Microsoft marketed IE initially. History repeats itself.

I am going to continue to use Firefox. Opera is the best solution but like a BMW it's high-maintenance with frequent crashes. Safari is a neurotic product by a neurotic company, so even if it's ahead this round, in the long term I don't want to be a user. Chrome is out because I don't want to be part of someone's marketing strategy until it's clear what the end goal is. But Firefox is stable, does 90% of what I want 90% correctly 90% of the time, so for a browser it's awesome.

You are forgetting that Chrome is open-source. There is and never will be any special feature in it that another browser couldn't adopt.

special...

[whopub]

After I've seen a guy with one arm and no legs roll a joint I kind of lost interest in the special olympics...

And it's a true story too.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

69 Performance

[Mud_Monster]

If you spend your time developing web browsers, you don't need to worry about your 69 performance.

Meh Squared

[xbill]

Great about the acid test.,

Hopefully sometime they will actually fix bugs like printing to the generic driver so I don't have to tell people to use IE.

I don't get mozilla - sometimes those ppl just miss the boat on stuff...

Yea yea yea

[akayani]

What FF3.5 lacks in is SVG tidy up. Go try Safari in the real world or EI8. In Safari text done in sIRF with transparency gets a green background. Using Lightbox swf objects appear over the mask.

Why even comment on IE8 it is just too crap.

The day Firefox gets 100% on the Acid test it will be because they did the work right across the board and the score of 100% will be reflecting that effort. I won't be that they looked at what the test assess and fixed those items to get a good grade. Mozilla isn't a marketing organization, they are devoted to code quality and nothing else.

Apple, Google and Microsoft will always be out to add spin. Spin is what they do.