One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version".
Actually, that's not "one of the results." That's a blog post I made where I offered my personal opinion after viewing the comparison tests. If you're going to quote my, please be a bit more honest about it. Thanks.
Here are the only two real-world comparisons I know of. Both have Theora making a pretty good showing. Beating H264 in all cases? Not at all. Good enough to replace H263 and H264 at YouTube, absolutely.
That's my biggest concern with embedded video support in Firefox. When everyone uses Flash, it's easy to stop random web pages from auto-running a pointless and loud video clip in my ear. I just install Flashblock. Can I do the same for Theora?
I ask because I just today had a movie review site auto-play a video and I went 'what the? am I running IE again?' It was truly a retro 1990s experience, and not in a good way.
I'm sure there will be a "disable auto-play" in Firefox about:config or an add-on that does it. There may even be a general preference for it in prefs UI at some point. Not only that, but Firefox itself can know when a background tab is playing video and give some kind of indicator which tab it is, maybe even putting a play/pause/mute control in the tab itself. That's not possible with Flash video because Flash doesn't provide an API that lets the browser know whether it's playing or not.
IE6 has lost 16 points of market share in 2008 alone. It will drop under 20% by the end of this month and should end 2009 in the single digits.
The only problem is that by the end of 2009, just as all the Web developers are breathing a sigh of relief at the death of IE6, that complaining will shift to the then "ancient" IE7 which will have been surpassed by the reasonably standards compliant but horribly slow IE8.
I guess that's "improvement".
I've just posted December and 2008 total stats for all of the browsers along with a bit of analysis. IE lost another point and a half of share in December and will finish the year down almost 8 points from where it started the year. That's not just bad, that's awful, horrible, really really bad.
It's especially bad considering that 2008 was a record year for new PC sales, with ~300,000,000 new PCs shipping with IE7 as the default browser!! They shipped 300 million copies of IE as the default and still lost 8 points of share during the year.
More at my blog (it really is worth reading if you're interested in this topic. i promise.)
Browser Market Share for December and 2008
- A
Tacvek, it's not the completing the bug number that's the magic here. It's that it will complete against the bug summary (which is the page title) as well. All you have to do is remember a word or two from a bug you've visited before and you can get back to it super-quick. That's the magic, not the bookmark keyword which we've all had for at least 8 or 9 years now.
The Safari number (100/100, pixel-perfect result) is for the WebKit nightly builds, which can be downloaded from the WebKit site or built by checking the code out of the (public) svn repository. This is directly comparable to a FireFox beta,
Um, no. Comparing snapshots from a codebase that's in the rampdown to release phase with a shapshot from a codebase that's not is certainly not a reasonable comparison.
Had you said "comparing the final nightly builds of WebKit being used by Safari just prior to shipping Safari 3.1 with the final nightly builds of Firefox just prior to shipping Firefox 3" then you'd have made a reasonable case.
Also the Opera team are right in the middle of a stabilisation cycle (9.5 just around the corner) but have managed to develop internal builds which pass Acid 3..
Good for Opera. I publicly congratulated them for that work the day they hit 100%.
But what level of support are they shipping in 9.5 and at what cost of delay to the 9.5 release did they make those Opera 9.next or Opera 10 gains?
Are Opera users and web developers going to have to wait weeks or months longer to get a better Opera experience in 9.5 (which won't 100% on Acid3 but does have other major improvements, presumably usability, standards-support, security, etc.) so that Opera could win the race to 100% Acid3 in a product that users and web developers won't get to see for months or years?
Right now, the most important thing Mozilla can do to improve the Web for developers and for users is to get Firefox 3 shipped. Delaying that by splitting focus, mostly for marketing or fanboy pride reasons, doesn't seem like such a great idea to me.
ACID 3 is symbolic, and it is important to recognize that and not to simply sound grumpy about it.
Well, I'd rather Mozilla contributors worked on issues that were real than issues that were "symbolic".
Mozilla has for 10 years, and continues today, to demonstrate a serious commitment to Web standards. For the better part of the last decade, Mozilla has been the only serious standards advocating competitor to Microsoft and Firefox over the last four years has almost single-handedly revived the standards-based Web.
So, if you think that a failure to drop everything else we're working on (to improve the Open standards-based Web) and start tap dancing for Ian Hickson and his Acid3 test erases our credibility on Web standards, then go ahead thinking that and don't expect me to waste further time trying to change your mind.
I don't know what happened, but upon installation and opening I now have three forward/back buttons....
This is a known issue and it's being worked on (bug 425079.) In the mean time, you can fix it by simply going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize and removing the extraneous buttons.
A Webkit nightly is not directly comparable to a Firefox beta. A Webkit nightly is comparable to a Firefox nightly, which hasn't gone trough the testing and triage that betas get.
More importantly, a browser, whether nightly or beta, that is in the final days or weeks of stabilization work before it's shipped to the world, cannot be compared to a browser that's at or near the beginning of a development cycle. You cannot expect browser makers in radically different stages of development to be working on the same kinds of things.
The last Firefox beta didn't have a home button on the main toolbar, and you couldn't put it back via "customise toolbar" unless you knew the workaround of displaying another toolbar and dragging it from that.
More accurately, IF you had hidden your Bookmarks Toolbar, then you had to restore your Bookmarks Toolbar visibility to its default state in order to move the Home button from there to the Navigation Tooolbar.
So, yes, if you'd previously customized your toolbars, then to accomplish what you wanted, you would have to customize your toolbars again.
>As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores >only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1
>>If we're comparing a Firefox beta then we may >>as well look at a newer version of Safari, too. >>The latest nightly builds of WebKit get 100/100 >>on Acid3. http://webkit.org/blog/173/
Actually, that's not quite fair. Firefox 3 beta 5 is the final beta and it's basically done. It will be a shipping browser at the same time as Safari 3.1. Comparing shipping browsers with nearly simultaneous releases (only a few months apart) is an eminently reasonable thing to do.
Perhaps, but shame on the devs for not announcing a 3.1 release to fix Acid3-compliance as soon as possible after 3.0's release. How I long for the days when standards were a priority on that team.
I think you're confused. The Acid 3 test is not a test for Web standards. It's a test for a particular (and rather small) subset of Web standards. It's not even a representative set of Web standards that would necessarily move the Web forward in meaningful ways if there were compatible implementations across the various browsers.
At Mozilla, we're definitely focused on fixing bugs in our various Web standards feature implementations as well as adding new Web standards capabilities, but we're not going to focus on any one test, especially a test that's designed as much to make browser vendors jump through hoops as much to advance the standards state of the Web.
Beta 4 only scored 68 / 100, so they have made some core changes. They fixed tests 42, 67, and 69. In addition, the test seems to run about 40% faster in B5 vs. B4, at least on my PC.
Yes, Firefox does include a few Gecko fixes that increase the Acid3 score, but not because Firefox 3 is chasing the test. We're focused on getting in the right set of changes between now and ship and that's not going to be defined by Acid3.
>Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*.
Ah, maybe you actually investigate and learn something about this before making ridiculous assertions of fact. Firefox passed Acid2 in a "development release" (dbaron's reflow branch builds absolutely were available as "development releases") precisely two years ago and trunk builds were passing in early December of 2006.
I don't know about your definition of "just now" or your definition of "development releases" but it seems to me that you're way off on at least one of those.
You certainly didn't see Apple ship Safari 3.1 with 100 on Acid3. WebKit (more accurately Safari) are at the beginning of a development cycle. They just shipped Safari 3.1 after quite a long dev cycle and are beginning Safari 3.next (or 4?) so it makes sense that they tear into their code in a pretty aggressive way. As far as I can tell, Opera 9.5 due sometime soon also won't pass Acid3. All of this work you're seeing on Acid3 is for the _next_ release, not the current release. (where current is Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5)
>Safari isn't anything more fancy than a wrapper for >the WebKit Framework, which incidentally, iTunes is >using as well.
Dave Hyatt, Apple Safari and WebKit engineer disagrees with you:
"Just to clear up a common misconception, iTunes does not use WebKit to render the music store. What you see when you visit the iTunes music store may look "web-like", but it isn't HTML, and it isn't rendered by WebKit."
Slashdot Mirror
One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version".
Actually, that's not "one of the results." That's a blog post I made where I offered my personal opinion after viewing the comparison tests. If you're going to quote my, please be a bit more honest about it. Thanks.
Here are the only two real-world comparisons I know of. Both have Theora making a pretty good showing. Beating H264 in all cases? Not at all. Good enough to replace H263 and H264 at YouTube, absolutely.
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/
"Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder."
Except that statement is provably false if by no other facts than that neither Theora nor H264 quality scales linearly with bitrate.
Beyond the obvious fail in your claim, you're also just wrong.
See this comparison and this comparison to see how Theora compares to the most popular real-world implementations of H264 on the Web.
That's my biggest concern with embedded video support in Firefox. When everyone uses Flash, it's easy to stop random web pages from auto-running a pointless and loud video clip in my ear. I just install Flashblock. Can I do the same for Theora?
I ask because I just today had a movie review site auto-play a video and I went 'what the? am I running IE again?' It was truly a retro 1990s experience, and not in a good way.
I'm sure there will be a "disable auto-play" in Firefox about:config or an add-on that does it. There may even be a general preference for it in prefs UI at some point. Not only that, but Firefox itself can know when a background tab is playing video and give some kind of indicator which tab it is, maybe even putting a play/pause/mute control in the tab itself. That's not possible with Flash video because Flash doesn't provide an API that lets the browser know whether it's playing or not.
IE6 has lost 16 points of market share in 2008 alone. It will drop under 20% by the end of this month and should end 2009 in the single digits. The only problem is that by the end of 2009, just as all the Web developers are breathing a sigh of relief at the death of IE6, that complaining will shift to the then "ancient" IE7 which will have been surpassed by the reasonably standards compliant but horribly slow IE8. I guess that's "improvement".
I've just posted December and 2008 total stats for all of the browsers along with a bit of analysis. IE lost another point and a half of share in December and will finish the year down almost 8 points from where it started the year. That's not just bad, that's awful, horrible, really really bad. It's especially bad considering that 2008 was a record year for new PC sales, with ~300,000,000 new PCs shipping with IE7 as the default browser!! They shipped 300 million copies of IE as the default and still lost 8 points of share during the year. More at my blog (it really is worth reading if you're interested in this topic. i promise.) Browser Market Share for December and 2008 - A
You've got it backwards. There is no longer an option to check as you browse and the check against the local list has always been the default.
Windows is not an open source consumer product, no matter if it contains bits of open source code or not.
Firefox was already the most widely used open source consumer product in the world before the Google revenue existed.
Tacvek, it's not the completing the bug number that's the magic here. It's that it will complete against the bug summary (which is the page title) as well. All you have to do is remember a word or two from a bug you've visited before and you can get back to it super-quick. That's the magic, not the bookmark keyword which we've all had for at least 8 or 9 years now.
- A
The Safari number (100/100, pixel-perfect result) is for the WebKit nightly builds, which can be downloaded from the WebKit site or built by checking the code out of the (public) svn repository. This is directly comparable to a FireFox beta,
Um, no. Comparing snapshots from a codebase that's in the rampdown to release phase with a shapshot from a codebase that's not is certainly not a reasonable comparison.
Had you said "comparing the final nightly builds of WebKit being used by Safari just prior to shipping Safari 3.1 with the final nightly builds of Firefox just prior to shipping Firefox 3" then you'd have made a reasonable case.
- A
Also the Opera team are right in the middle of a stabilisation cycle (9.5 just around the corner) but have managed to develop internal builds which pass Acid 3..
Good for Opera. I publicly congratulated them for that work the day they hit 100%.
But what level of support are they shipping in 9.5 and at what cost of delay to the 9.5 release did they make those Opera 9.next or Opera 10 gains?
Are Opera users and web developers going to have to wait weeks or months longer to get a better Opera experience in 9.5 (which won't 100% on Acid3 but does have other major improvements, presumably usability, standards-support, security, etc.) so that Opera could win the race to 100% Acid3 in a product that users and web developers won't get to see for months or years?
Right now, the most important thing Mozilla can do to improve the Web for developers and for users is to get Firefox 3 shipped. Delaying that by splitting focus, mostly for marketing or fanboy pride reasons, doesn't seem like such a great idea to me.
- A
ACID 3 is symbolic, and it is important to recognize that and not to simply sound grumpy about it.
Well, I'd rather Mozilla contributors worked on issues that were real than issues that were "symbolic".
Mozilla has for 10 years, and continues today, to demonstrate a serious commitment to Web standards. For the better part of the last decade, Mozilla has been the only serious standards advocating competitor to Microsoft and Firefox over the last four years has almost single-handedly revived the standards-based Web.
So, if you think that a failure to drop everything else we're working on (to improve the Open standards-based Web) and start tap dancing for Ian Hickson and his Acid3 test erases our credibility on Web standards, then go ahead thinking that and don't expect me to waste further time trying to change your mind.
- A
I don't know what happened, but upon installation and opening I now have three forward/back buttons....
This is a known issue and it's being worked on (bug 425079.) In the mean time, you can fix it by simply going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize and removing the extraneous buttons.
- A
A Webkit nightly is not directly comparable to a Firefox beta. A Webkit nightly is comparable to a Firefox nightly, which hasn't gone trough the testing and triage that betas get.
More importantly, a browser, whether nightly or beta, that is in the final days or weeks of stabilization work before it's shipped to the world, cannot be compared to a browser that's at or near the beginning of a development cycle. You cannot expect browser makers in radically different stages of development to be working on the same kinds of things.
- A
The last Firefox beta didn't have a home button on the main toolbar, and you couldn't put it back via "customise toolbar" unless you knew the workaround of displaying another toolbar and dragging it from that.
More accurately, IF you had hidden your Bookmarks Toolbar, then you had to restore your Bookmarks Toolbar visibility to its default state in order to move the Home button from there to the Navigation Tooolbar.
So, yes, if you'd previously customized your toolbars, then to accomplish what you wanted, you would have to customize your toolbars again.
- A
I don't think they're going backwards. Firefox 3 beta 4 is a huge improvement over even the stable shipping version of Firefox 2.
- A
>As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores
>only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1
>>If we're comparing a Firefox beta then we may
>>as well look at a newer version of Safari, too.
>>The latest nightly builds of WebKit get 100/100
>>on Acid3. http://webkit.org/blog/173/
Actually, that's not quite fair. Firefox 3 beta 5 is the final beta and it's basically done. It will be a shipping browser at the same time as Safari 3.1. Comparing shipping browsers with nearly simultaneous releases (only a few months apart) is an eminently reasonable thing to do.
- A
Perhaps, but shame on the devs for not announcing a 3.1 release to fix Acid3-compliance as soon as possible after 3.0's release. How I long for the days when standards were a priority on that team.
I think you're confused. The Acid 3 test is not a test for Web standards. It's a test for a particular (and rather small) subset of Web standards. It's not even a representative set of Web standards that would necessarily move the Web forward in meaningful ways if there were compatible implementations across the various browsers.
At Mozilla, we're definitely focused on fixing bugs in our various Web standards feature implementations as well as adding new Web standards capabilities, but we're not going to focus on any one test, especially a test that's designed as much to make browser vendors jump through hoops as much to advance the standards state of the Web.
- A
Yes, Firefox does include a few Gecko fixes that increase the Acid3 score, but not because Firefox 3 is chasing the test. We're focused on getting in the right set of changes between now and ship and that's not going to be defined by Acid3.
- A
>Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*.
Ah, maybe you actually investigate and learn something about this before making ridiculous assertions of fact. Firefox passed Acid2 in a "development release" (dbaron's reflow branch builds absolutely were available as "development releases") precisely two years ago and trunk builds were passing in early December of 2006.
I don't know about your definition of "just now" or your definition of "development releases" but it seems to me that you're way off on at least one of those.
- A
You certainly didn't see Apple ship Safari 3.1 with 100 on Acid3. WebKit (more accurately Safari) are at the beginning of a development cycle. They just shipped Safari 3.1 after quite a long dev cycle and are beginning Safari 3.next (or 4?) so it makes sense that they tear into their code in a pretty aggressive way. As far as I can tell, Opera 9.5 due sometime soon also won't pass Acid3. All of this work you're seeing on Acid3 is for the _next_ release, not the current release. (where current is Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5)
Reload the page and watch Safari 3.1 fail on Windows and Mac.
>Safari isn't anything more fancy than a wrapper for
>the WebKit Framework, which incidentally, iTunes is
>using as well.
Dave Hyatt, Apple Safari and WebKit engineer disagrees with you:
"Just to clear up a common misconception, iTunes does not use WebKit to render the music store. What you see when you visit the iTunes music store may look "web-like", but it isn't HTML, and it isn't rendered by WebKit."
>This is nowhere near Kazaa's trying to install adware with their product
Nice to see that's what Apple's degenerated to -- as long as we're not as bad as Kazaa, every thing's good.