Acid3 Test Released

An anonymous reader writes ""The Web Standards Project has announced the release of Acid3, the latest test designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in browsers. 'By making sure their software adheres to the test, the creators of these products can be more confident that their software will display and function with Web pages correctly both now and with Web pages of the future. The Acid3 Test is designed to test specifications for Web 2.0, and exposes potential flaws in implementations of the public ECMAScript 262 and W3C Document Object Model 2 standards.' Screenshots at the Drunken Fist site show the success of Safari 3 (which originally scored 31, but is now Scoring 87/100) IE6, and IE7 (massive fail, of course)'." There are additional discussions of the new test happening around the web.

Bad day for IE8

[by Anonymous Coward]

It gets... 17. Heard at Microsoft "ACID3? We just passed ACID2! AH CRAP!"

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

At least that beta doesn't crash. When I ran on a recent Opera 9.50 beta build, it counted, stalled, stalled, crashed. ;-)

Re:Bad day for IE8

[jimbojw (1010949)]

Hey now, at least it passes the reference rendering, which is more than I can say for some browsers (*cough* lynx *cough*)

Re:IE8 Cheats ACID2!!

[Bodero (136806)]

Why Isn't IE8 Passing ACID2? [msdn.com]

Basically, it fails because of XSS on the other sites.

Firefox 2.0.0.12

[poetmatt (793785)]

I get a 51/100 with firefox 2....wonder how 3 will do.

Re:Firefox 2.0.0.12

[The MAZZTer (911996)]

3b3 gets a 61. Opera 9.5 is the best I tested at 65. Safarai 3.0.4 for Windows got a 39. IE7 got a 12 and also managed to mangle the page the most.

Re:Firefox 2.0.0.12

[Jugalator (259273)]

Opera 9.5 is the best I tested at 65.

It better be good, since Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technical Officer of Opera Software, worked together with Bert Bos to develop the CSS standard.

I'm not sure how many actually knows this. *shrug*

Re:Firefox 2.0.0.12

[thornomad (1095985)]

Woo hoo! IE 6.0 displays this just fine: http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html [acidtests.org] Read 'em and weep Firefox!

Link to the actual test

[I kan Spl (614759)]

Why does slashdot keep linking to dead blogs?

The actual test is http://acid3.acidtests.org/ [acidtests.org] here.

I'd read TFA but...

[Fozzyuw (950608)]

My browser won't render the page properly.

Latest Safari nightly scores...

[The Ancients (626689)]

90/100 [mothership.co.nz].

Getting pretty close.

Not to mention...

[rsborg (111459)]

The latest webkit (Safari) nightly is just amazingly fast.

Faster than FF3 beta 4, much much faster than FF2 or IE7.

Konqueror

[kevmatic (1133523)]

I haven't seen anybody answer konqueror yet!

I tried it in Konqi 3.5.8 with Gentoo. It asked me what I wanted to do with "empty.txt" then segfaulted. Anyone fairing better?

Re:Konqueror

[by Anonymous Coward]

That crash is fixed in 3.5.9 (which does 41)... 4.0.2 does 61, 4.1-pre 63. Early 4.0.x versions do less.

Slashdoted

[fluch (126140)]

Conclusion: ACID3 test didn't pass Slashdot test. Too bad.

Re:Slashdoted

[The Ancients (626689)]

It's ok here. I've even scripted 700 machines here to reload the page repeatedly just to ensure it isn't.

Results in major browsers

[Lobais (743851)]

See http://browsershots.org/http://acid3.acidtests.org/ [browsershots.org] for the test in 75 different browsers.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 [wikipedia.org] also lists the results for the developversions of browsers:
Webkit: 87
Firefox: 67

Firefox

[zulater (635326)]

I got a 100/100 on the reference image.

Re:Firefox

[Random BedHead Ed (602081)]

Hey, me too. Are you also using Netscape Navigator 4.01?

Thunderbird ;]

[Przemo-c (1010877)]

Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 with thunderbrowse scores 52/100 ;]

100% score on IE8

[spacemky (236551)]

I got a 100% score rendering Acid3 on IE8! All I had to do was add the following line to the top of the page!

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

Once that meta tag is there, all web pages look just as they're supposed to! I'm so glad Microsoft finally fixed this whole compatibility fiasco.

Web 2.0?

[Tatsh (893946)]

Someone again try to explain to me the definition of web 2.0, and don't tell me flash.

I personally think it's the move of the entire web (the content that matters) to valid XHTML, CSS, etc (of course everything is controlled dynamically by PHP/Perl/whatever you want). I also hope there can be an open standard soon to do the same functionality that Youtube's Flash container that runs on everything and that everyone agrees upon. Silverlight is obviously closed and so is Flash. We need an open source mid-quality (and high-quality) video player that loads quickly and is OS-independent, just like Flash. I think that is all that is missing in this 'Web 2.0'.

How do the acid-test creators test the acid test?

[dskoll (99328)]

Seriously... if no browser gets 100/100, how do the test creators generate the reference image? And how do they know there are no bugs in their test? I'm genuinely curious...

Re:How do the acid-test creators test the acid tes

[kryten_nl (863119)]

Magic

Re:How do the acid-test creators test the acid tes

[CaptainPinko (753849)]

They don't. They read through their spec carefully and presumably do it by hand. I believe with the first ACID test their was a bug with the reference image that was reported by someone implementing a browser.

What would be really useful....

[CodeShark (17400)]

Is if there was a way to not only get a copy of the acid test fails, but a quick list of which browsers fail which test and what that should mean. So that us legions of OS coders or even Mozilla, Opera, or Safari's own guys could get busy and fix it in their next releases.

Anyone have this or know some web location where it's happening?

Just found it for Firefox 3.0 Beta (3)

[CodeShark (17400)]

Passes 59 tests in Xp. Interesting Stats:

• 37 of the tests that fail in FF 2.X are also fails in FF 3.0 beta.
• Three of the fails are significantly different, not sure if this means progress or not
• 1 fail is a minor difference
• Firefox 2 passed a test (#69) that FF 3 did not
• and finally, FF 3.0 passes 8 tests directly that FF 2.0 does not.

• • 
    That said, I looked at a couple of the notes on Bugzilla for Firefox and they are already looking at the bug list... wonder who will be the fastest to fix the most....

W3C validator

[atomic-penguin (100835)]

If these acid tests are based on standards. Why is the only acid test that passes the W3C validator, the Acid 1 test?

1. Acid 1 [w3.org]
2. Acid 2 [w3.org]
3. Acid 3 [w3.org]

Perhaps, I am missing the point of these acid tests. I'm not a web developer by trade, so I don't claim to be an expert on CSS. From personal experience, CSS has allowed me to use much less complex HTML in the little web publishing I have done. I never seem to get consistent results when I test my pages in different browsers. I hope that these "standards" Acid tests lead to greater compatibility across browsers.

Do these tests increase compatibility by pushing the envelope on new standards, or are they just a browser-war pissing contest?

Re:W3C validator

[Millennium (2451)]

If these acid tests are based on standards. Why is the only acid test that passes the W3C validator, the Acid 1 test?

Because more recent Web standards include sections on how certain kinds of errors are supposed to be handled. These need to be tested just like everything else, but up until Acid2 many browsers weren't very good about that.

Remember, the point of Acid tests is to be a thorn in browser developers' sides: find areas of the standard that no one currently does well and test for them. Browsers shouldn't pass Acid tests when the tests first come out: that would be missing the point of the tests in the first place.

Re:Firefox

[brunascle (994197)]

the test is here [acidtests.org].

i'm getting a 50/100 in Firefox.

Re:Opera

[wile_e_wonka (934864)]

I just tried it on Opera 9.5 Beta, build 9755. I got a 60/100. Then I tried again and got a 61/100. Then a 60/100 on a third try.

All of the rectangles are grey (two different shades), the test name is red and does not have a shadow, and there is an x in the upper right hand corner.

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

Ooh, my Opera 9.50 weekly actually didn't crash this time. Maybe the test was changed, or something in Opera did.

Anyway, Opera 9.50.9807 receives a 65.

Re:Firefox

[caerwyn (38056)]

Interestingly, I'm not getting an 87 with Safari 3.0.4- I'm getting a 39.

Re:Firefox

[dal20402 (895630)]

It's misleading for the summary to say "Safari" gets 87/100 when the version of Safari that does that is not yet released.

Run current WebKit nightlies to get the high score now. The changes will be in the upcoming Safari 3.1 release.

Re:

[CrazedWalrus (901897)]

I was wondering the same thing. Isn't it FF3 that just began rendering ACID2 correctly?

Besides, I see these as a process or goal -- giving the browser makers something concrete and visual to shoot for, as well as an easy way for users to judge the quality of their browser of choice. If the thing was just released, I'm not really surprised that many of the browsers don't pass it completely. Now a year or two from now is a different story, after the browser makers have had some time to address the issues the

Re:Firefox

[bunratty (545641)]

The test consists largely of 100 JavaScript tests designed to throw an assertion on failure and return a certain value on pass. The score is how many of the tests out of 100 pass. You can see which tests failed by clicking or shift-clicking the A in Acid3 after the test completes. In the sense that each test can relatively independently pass or fail (although some tests depend on previous tests), yes, it is a quantitative test.

The other part of the test is rendering the Acid3 text with shadow and the colored rectangles. By seeing how the Acid3 test fails in many other browsers, you can see that it can also render X, Fail, and a picture of a cat on failure of some rendering tests, typically in red so they stand out.

Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...

[setagllib (753300)]

Yes, biased towards conforming with open international published standards, rather than to any specific vendor's implementation. It just happens the best of the best web browsers try to conform to the same standards, scoring much higher than Microsoft's offering which is deliberately designed to break from the standard to ensure lockin.

Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

Not quite. When none of the browsers are getting 100/100 and the only browser to get over a 60 is a safari beta, I think it's safe to say that it's a test designed so that every browser will fail. That's the point: they're giving solid targets to browser developers and giving a concise score to everyone else so that they know where the browsers stand in the next generation of web tech.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that complaining about it being designed so that IE would fail is like saying that American Gladiators was designed so that my 8 year old brother would fail. Sure, it has that effect in the end, but the fact that he's under-equipped for such a competition isn't American Gladiators' fault.

Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...

[Ambiguous Coward (205751)]

Comment on your analogy:

I think the mere fact that American Gladiators is considered tv-worthy indicates that we, as a nation, have failed. Also, sorry about your brother. That was really brutal when they knocked him into the pool.

Just sayin'.

-G

Re:

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

no browser can make it to 100 even if somebody had everything working

With an attitude like that I don't expect any browser to ever make it ;)

Re:

[Goaway (82658)]

Actually, it's tests that one, or preferably more than one, of Firefox, Safari, Opera or IE fail.

Re:

[djcapelis (587616)]

I believe the standard for the last 16 tests were webkit and firefox trunk must fail.

So IE or Opera failing was actually regarded as insufficient.

Re:Geek version of a measuring contest?

[gerbalblaste (882682)]

No this is a measurement of compliance to international standards.

Re:

[corychristison (951993)]

... and 64/100 for Firefox 3.0b5pre ("Minefield")

Re:Firefox 3 beta 3

[BZ (40346)]

Why? The test expressly picked things that one of Opera, Safari, and Firefox would fail, preferably more than one, and tried to balance the number of tests each would fail.

Put another way it looked really hard for things to test that would give browsers low scores.

There's nothing to say that the things it tests are necessarily useful. Some are, some are not.

Re:Perhaps....

[bunratty (545641)]

Yes, there is almost no correlation between how well a browser does on Acid tests and how well it renders pages on the web. The purpose of the Acid tests is to break the chicken-and-egg problem of web development. The web developers tend not to use features unless all popular browsers support them. On the other hand, the developers of the web browsers tend not to add features that are not used by web developers. Without anyone willing to go first, the implementation and use of new web standards stalls.

The purpose of the Acid tests is to break this logjam by using these new standards in a very public way so that web developers will be motivated to implement them. The "my browser does better than your browser" posturing is a bit immature, but as a side effect it popularizes the faults of browsers and motivates the browser developers to fix them. Then, the web developers use the new features after they are well supported.

Re:

[ivan256 (17499)]

The ideal here actually is that if a reasonable number of mainstream browsers scored 100 on the test, web developers could use all of the features the test exercises and have a reasonable expectation that their page will display correctly for end users.

The test is about making life better for web developers, and about making the web more interoperable, instead of having sites which jump through browser predicated hoops, or restrict users to "IE7.0 or newer on 32-bit Windows" or the like. Thus having your fa

Re:Too late for IE8?

[edwdig (47888)]

If they actually implemented the standards well, they wouldn't have to worry about specific tests, they would just do well on them by default.

Have you ever tried reading the HTML/CSS specs? They're huge and often vaguely worded. There were often sections that just weren't intuitive, and the only real approach to implementing them was to just figure out what other browser did and copy it. The specs were created by people who have no intention of implementing them themselves, and it really shows.

Re:Unfair browser bashing?

[bunratty (545641)]

You're exactly correct that the Acid tests test specific browser flaws. They are testing exactly the flaws that plague web developers. That way, when all popular browsers pass the Acid tests, web developers don't need to work around the flaws in each different browser. We all benefit by getting web sites with fancy new features that work in all browsers. The scores are not meaningful, but are a way to motivate the developers of web browsers to fix their flaws so they're not embarrassed by a low or non-passing score.

Re:I would check out the screen captures, but...

[emilper (826945)]

yes, looks like the acid tests are failing the slashdot test.