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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.
First of all, I'm not trolling.
Secondly, Firefox is my favourite browser, and I use it as my default both at work on my Windows workstation and at home on my Mac.
Having said that, with two corporate giants with deep pockets, and their respective browsers making solid improvements with every version, I'm wondering if it's just a matter of time before Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome become better than Firefox, which is essentially a community effort. That's not to say anything bad about the excellent work that Mozilla's programmers have done with Firefox, but they're doing so by drawing on fewer resources than those two large corporations.
Granted, Microsoft also has a lot of resources to draw from, but they also let IE stagnate because they thought they had a browser monopoly.
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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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
than just firefox...i tried it in Lynx and i cant get it to pass at all...
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Your package manager not having much software in it does not make your browser better. Only your package database worse.
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.
I've just tested 3.5b4 on RHEL 5 and I get 91/100
Not only that but Opera provide a repository for Ubuntu anyway. So not having Opera available is just poor config.
'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."
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 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.
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.