Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test

An anonymous reader writes "Frédéric Wang, an engineer at the MathJax project, reports that the latest nightly build of Firefox now passes the MathML Acid2 test. Screenshots in his post show a comparison with the latest nightly Chrome Canary, and it's not pretty. He writes 'Google developers forked Webkit and decided to remove from Blink all the code (including MathML) on which they don't plan to work in the short term.'"

Comments

chrome fails MathML acid1

[johnjones]

I simply cant believe this...

MathML is a pretty important to allowing papers to be...

Re:chrome fails MathML acid1

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I browse pages that use MathML every single day (literally), opengl.org ref pages, have MathML scattered throughout - I've never bothered installing chrome on a workstation once due to lack of MathML support, and don't ever plan on doing so until it can (among many other missing features).

Re:chrome fails MathML acid1

[dgatwood]

Chrome stable passed it just fine.

Are you looking at the same MathML Acid tests that I am? These are not the same tests as the original Acid and Acid 2 tests.

Chrome Stable, at least on OS X, fails MathML Acid 1 miserably, as does Chrome Canary. All the fractions are shown as the left part followed by a space followed by the right part instead of as a fraction. Safari on OS X is basically correct for MathML Acid 1 (albeit with the ugliest parentheses I've ever seen), but if you reload the page, the curly braces disappear, as do the comma inside the curly braces and the plus sign.

And the MathML Acid 2 test looks like a freaking Picasso on all three browsers.

Re:chrome fails MathML acid1

[dgatwood]

The reason to improve MathML support isn't browsers. It's eBook readers that share the underlying rendering engines. Lots of textbook publishers want to use MathML, but without robust, reliable, visually appealing support, everybody has to do awful hacks with inline images or (hopefully) SVG instead.

Re:chrome fails MathML acid1

[tyrione]

The reason to improve MathML support isn't browsers. It's eBook readers that share the underlying rendering engines. Lots of textbook publishers want to use MathML, but without robust, reliable, visually appealing support, everybody has to do awful hacks with inline images or (hopefully) SVG instead.

Spot on. EPub 3.x with MathML 3.0 is vital to work in digital publishing for iOS, Android, etc.

Re:When you have money,

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect they were using Chrome in a Google Spreadsheet when calculating their bid for Motorola Mobility.

Re:I for one am glad they left out Blink.

[corychristison]

My many web design/development clients would disagree with you. I don't even want to recall the times I've had to tell them No for blinking things.

Unfortunately they think blinking == attention getting, whereas we think blinking == f*cking irritating.

Re:Who cares?

[Billly Gates]

Ask a web developer what they think about Chrome?

It is not all positive. It is buggy and has proprietary extensions similiar to something that sounded familiar in the past? Its javascript sometimes does not load on sites and its version of HTML 5 is differnent from others. HTML5test.com tests things that W3C implements a little differently or not at all.

Remember IE 6 was lean mean and standards compliant compared to the god awefull netscape 10 years ago too. Hard to believe in a place like slashdot to admit but if you go read slashdot history on the most discussed stories of all time "What keeps you on Windows from 2002" IE 6 is mentioned!

The switch to a new rendering engine is going to cause issues soon and many corporate oriented SVs and site makers will not be pleased.

You're thinking of Chrome and Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Webkit was caught patching to specifically pass the Acid3 test.

Re:Math symbols are so archaic so who gives a F

[maxwell demon]

Just a note—sin^2(x) cannot be sin(sin(x)) because that is a datatype error.

You just showed that you don't know enough mathematics.

The input to the sine function is not an angle, it is a real or complex number. If real, this number often (but not always!) describes some angle. If complex, it obviously won't describe an angle.

The sine function is defined as

sin x = (exp(i x) - exp(-i x)) / (2i)

where i is the imaginary number, and exp(x) is defined by the series

exp x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + ... + x^n/n! + ...

Note that, since the convergence radius of the exponential series is infinite, and the sine is just a linear combination of exponentials, the sine is defined on all complex numbers. Since it is complex-valued, sin sin x is indeed well defined for all complex numbers x.

Moreover, if you restrict the sine to real numbers (that is, only accept real numbers), you still have a well defined sin sin x, because the real sine function is also real-valued (more exactly, its values are restricted to the interval [-1,1]).

Also, the output is in general not a rational number (the only thing you could have meant with "ratio" that makes sense in this context).