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Firefox Beta Scores 93 On Acid3 Test
CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70, 71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari — still not only rates higher (I got scores of 99 once and 100 most of the time) but is usually faster by a little (1.1 sec avg. vs. 1.4 over ten runs apiece) but only because the new Firefox beta was all over the map — frequently better by 25% (.85sec) or tanking badly with rendering times in the 2.5 — 3 second range, and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)."
This should be news when FF3.5 gets to RC or final release status.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Presumably the test should take about the same time to run each time, right?
Also, how can Safari's score change from 99 to 100 without any changes in the code? Is this a bug in Safari?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Opera 10alpha is also a 100/100 on the acid 3 since dec 12, 2008
http://www.opera.com/docs/history/
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?
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.
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.
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.
This space left intentionally blank.
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.
http://www.treatyist.com/ is the corrected working link. ( You had com./ )
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 ...
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I think that on balance users will see the perceived cost* of switching browser as much greater than the perceived cost of not viewing your site. That's not a criticism on your site, I'm just saying for anything short of Facebook they're not going to bother.
Why not detect if they're using IE and have a pop-up saying "Does this site look broken? Your browser does not properly support internet standards." and direct them to the appropriate explaination, list of browsers, etc. That gets the same message across without costing you any readership, and it removes the elitist connotations that "special browsers" seem to have.
* Emphasis on "perceived". I do find that users adapt to new browsers more easily than they think: my mother wound up easily switching from IE to a customised Firefox-lookalike when her broadband company's setup disk automatically installed it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"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?
Don't bother us until they reach 100%.
One of the requirements is that the be able to render TrueType fonts. Correct rendering of Acid3 requires displaying a TrueType font called "Ahem". Unless an underlying graphical environment gives applications the privilege of installing arbitrary fonts into the display server, the application code has to do its own rendering. In any case, perfect rendering of TrueType fonts involves interpreting a hint bytecode, which is subject to a U.S. patent.[1] There is no evidence that Apple provides royalty-free licenses for general use in free software. FreeType 2 comes with an "auto-hinter" that does the patented part of TrueType in a different way that doesn't infringe, but its results aren't pixel-for-pixel identical to those of the TrueType spec.
The big question: Does correct rendering of Ahem in Acid3 require the patented parts of TrueType?
[1] Slashdot, Apple, W3C are headquartered in the United States, and the majority of the Web Standards Project's managers and members are in the United States. "Sucks to be you, American" is flamebait.
As I appear into my crystal ball, I see that Firefox 3.5 is released and still achieves 93/100. Wow, I'm a psychic!
Ffx 3.1/3.5 has been sitting at 93/100 for over 6 months, and the devs have stated *numerous* times that achieving 100/100 on Acid3 is NOT a priority for the 3.5 release, largely because implementing SVG fonts (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490/) for the purpose of passing those last few Acid3 tests is a much lower priority than other things they're working on (like javascript JIT). Why your summary of the 3.5b4 release focuses on something that literally hasn't changed in several beta releases is beyond me.
So, can we please move on now or are you going to switch to Safari because of that newfangled Youtube interface that implements SVG fonts? Oh sorry, I was looking into my crystal ball again and saw the web circa 2025.
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...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
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.
Comment of the year
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
than just firefox...i tried it in Lynx and i cant get it to pass at all...
Good people go to bed earlier.
"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?
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.
It's harder to concentrate with that particular feed back loop.
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
I had a 100 score with 3.5beta4. Everytime I did the test and really fast.
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
Also a guy who bitches about MS and it's technology yet uses ASP.NET.
EPIC!!!
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.
Make something better then.
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
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.
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.
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...
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
Real geeks use text based browsing.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
I've just tested 3.5b4 on RHEL 5 and I get 91/100
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.
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?
The development branch of Firefox was on 93 half a year ago.
'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."
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.
how is babby formed?
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.
Sounds like a good way to encourage fixes. :)
You can pry my Lynx from my cold, dead, geek fingers.
"But this one goes to 11!"
"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'.
So he is forced to use a MS product to punish the others who are forced to use a MS product? Makes perfect sense.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I didn't know you like ASCII pron.
No he's into the multi-ethnic stuff; Unicode porn.
"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
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.
"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?
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.
Comment of the year
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.
This is my sig.
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.
This is my sig.
You can keep track of how well all the browsers do on Acid3 by watching the Acid3 browsershots or the Acid3 Wikipedia article.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I don't like that language, this is a family website.
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.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Oops... I posted the wrong link to the Acid2 browsershots.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
...and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)
That's because it's worth taking our time when we do 69. ;-)
Valtor
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
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.
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.
Futurist Traditionalism
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
Comment of the year
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
This is my sig.
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?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
This is my sig.
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!? :-)
-- dnl
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.
This is my sig.
You embarrassed him about it so much he took his page down!
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which family? The Addams Family?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
To get porn!
-- dnl
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.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why bother? Apple's already done it with Safari... I just checked myself, running beta 4 for Mac and Windows and both scored 100.
Stop! Dremel time!
Hope this helps for your feedback.
Immensely, thank you.
This is my sig.
If you spend your time developing web browsers, you don't need to worry about your 69 performance.
> 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).
Oops! Sorry, this is Slashdot. I meant to say "the summary says..." I didn't RTFA. Thanks for the update!
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.