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

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/

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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?).

this looks like a bigger problem

[nimbius]

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

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.

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: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.

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: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.