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IE 5.5 Beats IE6 and IE7 On Acid 3
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Mar 09, 2008 09:24 PM
from the acid-reflux dept.
from the acid-reflux dept.
Steven Noonan sends us to a page where he is collecting and updating results for various browsers on the newly released Acid 3 test. No browser yet scores 100 on this test. (We discussed Acid 3 when it came out.) He writes, "It's not surprising that Internet Explorer is losing to every other modern browser, but how did IE 5.5 beat IE 6.0 and 7.0?" All of the IE versions score below 20 on Acid 3.
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Acid3 Test Released 309 comments
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.
Submission: Internet Explorer 5.5 beats IE6 and IE7 in Acid 3 by Anonymous Coward
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Read that too fast... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And older firefox versions do better too (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly the point of the Acid tests. They're designed to motivate browser developers by pointing out a lot of flaws in current implementations.
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Re:Read that too fast... (Score:4, Funny)
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Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes it seem more like a suggestion...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing intent with result.
The difference is that the teams working on Safari, Opera, Firefox, et al want to improve their product. Microsoft didn't care for a very long time. In fact, the Safari team even have a bug filed for the rendering issues Safari has with Acid3 [webkit.org]. Further, they're communicating frequently with their user base and anyone else interested with regard to their progress [webkit.org].
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Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft stopped development on IE because:
1) They weren't charging any money for it,
2) There was no feasible competition on Windows,
3) It was definitely "good enough" and in some ways superior to competing browsers. (XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft, you might recall.)
Considering that IE and Netscape were both pretty much just pulling "standards" out of their ass in the early days, the only reason Mozilla browser are more standards-compliant now is that they shredded the Netscape 4 code and started from scratch. IE is IE because, at the time this code was being written, the "standard" was "what Netscape did."
All I can say is that I hope HTML5 starts hitting browsers soon... HTML5 is the first Internet standard designed by people who know what people actually use the web for.
(CSS is supposed to be a language to describe page layout. And yet, it has no support for columns until CSS3. It took THREE VERSIONS to come up with a layout idea that's been used in newspapers for books for literally centuries?! This is a language designed by people amazingly removed from reality. And that's just one example of the idiocy of web standards.)
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Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't even remotely the same actions. Microsoft disbanded the Internet Explorer development team and assigned the developers to different projects. Netscape/Mozilla.org decided to invest extra time rewriting things to get a better end result. I personally think that was a bad investment, but that doesn't mean they killed the browser market and stopped development.
Actually, Microsoft had a head-start with CSS because Netscape bet on JSSS. The W3C subsequently chose to reject JSSS in favour of CSS, meaning that while Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 with preliminary CSS support, Netscape scrambled to transcode CSS to JSSS so that Netscape 4 had some kind of CSS support.
So far from the standard being "what Netscape did", it was actually the other way around. The reason why Microsoft is so far behind is entirely their own doing.
Ahh yes, HTML 5, complete with the <font> element type. Because they know what people actually use the web for.
Web pages have infinite vertical space. Newspapers and books don't. Horizontal space is at a premium for web pages. It's not as important for newspapers and books. Unsurprisingly, a layout strategy that trades horizontal space for vertical space isn't a high priority for a technology primarily aimed at web pages. I wouldn't say that web standards that actually prioritise the web are nothing but "idiocy", I'd say that's entirely sensible.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But I certainly would'nt say that they "did'nt care" . Netscape (the company) was essentially getting squeezed illegaly by Microsoft and had bigger problems to worry about
Oh please. They couldn't stand the heat, so they got out of the kitchen. Netscape wasn't being "illegally squeezed" by Microsoft, their product just sucked and they couldn't compete. Let's assume Dell got the choice to ship both Netscape 4 and IE 4 with Windows; wh
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, a
Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really true. Browser vendors participate in the W3C working groups that publish these specifications. They have an active role in creating them. Take a look at the acknowledgment section of the CSS 2 specification [w3.org], for example.
And of course, one of the four editors of the specification is Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera.
So you see, far from the poor old browser vendors not having the resources to make anything better and passively reacting to anything the W3C says, you can see that the browser vendors are substantially the people who made the specifications.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, so your argument is that it's only a standard if other people aren't allowed to participate, because they don't always agree with you?
I don't think coming to a consensus is "like if they weren't participating because the result will be a big soup", I think it's the whole point of authoring standards.
Re:Uhhh (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, what good is a recommendation, you ask? Plenty - mostly interoperability. The W3C provides a specification and recommends people implement it. Those that do can interoprate. The consumer wins.
How do you get the vendors to implement the RECs? Make it an important bullet point on their feature lists. The Acid tests are a particularly well done kick in the backside for browser vendors. They have effectively become more important than the bullet point that says "standards compliant" because they are a (limited) test suite. For vendors to be able to say they do well in the tests, certain key parts of the RECs must be implemented and done so correctly, there is no room for buggy or partial implementation.
The result in the end is better interoperability. The RECs provide that common basis that vendors can't quibble over. The Acid tests are both the carrot to get them implementing the RECs and proof that they did so (partially) correctly.
/Mike
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Re:Uhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
I just find it very amusing. We have 'standard' that no one really follows. When the best score is a 90% from a browser that probably is the lest supported in terms of actual web sites, and the next couple that come it are at 70% or so. That is like a C- with no curve. Not exactly worthy of bragging...
It just makes me wonder what all the fuss is about.
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Summary answers its own question (Score:5, Funny)
Brett
Old Web Browser Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old Web Browser Standards (Score:5, Funny)
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safari (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
Re:safari (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari development builds are doing well on Acid3, and Safari passed Acid2 quickly, because Safari developers fixed the problems that the Acid tests demonstrate. If you look at the stable release builds of Safari, they do far worse than the stable release builds of Opera and Firefox. But if you look at the latest development builds, Safari does far better than Opera and Firefox. Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
There's far too much bickering about which browser is best and which browser is behind the curve. It seems that Safari, Opera, and Firefox are all very good browsers each with their own strengths in standards compliance and user interface, with IE constantly playing catch-up.
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Re:safari (Score:5, Informative)
I think your idea here is a bit off. The stable version of Safari does perform more poorly than the stable versions of Firefox and Opera, but I think this is more likely attributable to Apple's more leisurely release schedule. The article referenced here was obviously put together by someone more focused on Windows and OS X. They only tried to test one browser on one version of Linux, compared to the dozen or so for the other OS's. It is, then, understandable that you would get that impression from the data presented. What a lot of people forget is that Safari uses the Webkit rendering engine which is also used in a variety of other browsers whose developers also contribute to it. The stable version of Konquerer 3.5.8 uses the same rendering engine and scores a 52 on the Acid 3 test, better than either Firefox or Opera. So Webkit is being updated and did, in fact, do better than Gecko or Presto for stable release versions when Acid 3 was published. (Note Konquerer 4.0.2 scores a 62, but I don't know if that is considered a "stable" branch.)
Mind you, this is not to imply that the Acid 3 test can really judge the respective compliance of the engines in general. This is not the case. The test was designed with bias in mind, bias against Webkit and Gecko. The criteria for inclusion in the test was that one or the other had to fail it and we don't know how many of the Acid 3 authors were focusing on one engine or another. If anything Opera and IE should be doing better than Firefox or Konquerer or Safari, since there are probably a number of tests those browsers fail, but which were excluded from Acid 3 simply because both the Gecko and Webkit engines passed it.
I know for a fact that developers of both Gecko and Webkit are specifically using these tests as a way to find problems to fix, which is great since that is why the tests were written; not to try to measure "compliance."
This is true enough, well except about IE maybe. In my own personal experience every browser other than IE works just fine for rendering everything I create to the standards. There might be the occasional bug or edge case, but I never run across them. IE, on the other hand, I have to create work arounds every single time. I'm not sure it is "playing catch up" so much as deliberately failing to implement huge portions of many standards as a way to prevent cross platform compatibility and keep Web applications that undermine their platform lock-in from being a real threat.
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Re:safari (Score:4, Insightful)
Are these really different? The Acid Tests test standards compliance, so if you do well on them, even if it is your aim to do so, aren't you embracing standards?
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Re:safari (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:safari (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe this is obvious but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe this is obvious but... (Score:5, Informative)
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Some insight regarding the Acid 3 Test (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yes, of course it has less bugs, because it's much smaller and supports far fewer features, but that doesn't make it better, it's nigh on useless for everything people want to do nowadays.
At the end of the day, IE5.5 supports less features and gracefully falls back where it fails on a feature as it should. IE6 and IE7 are much more ambitious and implement far more features, but when pushed to the limits on these features they fail more horribly than IE5 which doesn't even try. There is an argument that features shouldn't be implemented at all if they don't work perfectly but I disagree, the fact is the features in question almost certainly work in say 90% of cases it's just that Acid3 is specifically exploiting the cases where it doesn't work rather than where it does.
People are free to stick with IE5.5 if they like the fact it does better on the Acid3 test if they want, but don't come crying when you can't use half the features on sites that are designed for the new series of browsers.
Acid3 is doing it's job well, it's highlighting problems in implementations so that they can be fixed in future versions. I'm not sure why some people see Acid tests as a tool to attack browsers with, that's not the purpose. Whilst crappy journalism might like to use it for this purpose one would hope that Slashdot was above Daily Mail type shoddy stories.
Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Informative)
It even has your same link right in the summary...
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Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Funny)
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Three months later (Score:5, Funny)
We regret to hear of the shortcoming you found in ACID 3 Test Home Basic. We have not forgotten our advertised promise to pass the test. On that note, we are proud to introduce the ACID 3 Test Pro! IE8 happily passes this version of ACID 3, which is comprised of VBScript, ActiveX, and Silverlight technologies.
Yours Truly,
Department of Extending Standards and Compatibilities
Microsoft
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Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Informative)
It is a problem, but it's not the hard-coding people seem to think it is. The problem is not that Internet Explorer 8 is checking for www.webstandards.org, the problem is that the mirrors that are failing are changing the test in a way that is important to Internet Explorer. Part of the test refers to a page that intentionally doesn't exist in order to check a fallback option. The trouble is that this page is referred to with an absolute URL, which means that when you simply copy the test to another host, it becomes a cross-domain issue.
Ian's pointing out that it's still a failure so it should be subject to the same fallback, which is correct, but the important point is that it's failing to load in a different way to how it would on the www.webstandards.org host because the mirrors didn't take the cross-domain issue into account. I expect the final version of Internet Explorer 8 to correct this problem, but it's not at all a case of Microsoft attempting to "cheat", just an unfortunate coincidence.
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mirrors not introduce change (Score:4, Informative)
The test should work from http://webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html [webstandards.org] and http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html [webstandards.org], but IE8 fails the first one. The mirrors might exacerbate the problem, but they certainly did not introduce anything that wasn't in the original test.
However, it is true that this issue has nothing to do with hardcoding a certain URL and trying to cheat.
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Re:mirrors not introduce change (Score:4, Informative)
It's not an intentional part of the test, it's accidental, a side-effect of webstandards.org failing to canonicalise their hostnames. If you read the press release, it only refers to the www version and nowhere is the no-www version mentioned, nor is this issue brought up in the technical guide. If they were trying to include this in the test, they'd have picked a hostname foreign to both the www and no-www versions so that it failed reliably.
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Re:IE8 Beta 1? (Score:5, Informative)
It was probably modded down because we've already had this discussion in three different articles over the last week. IE8 beta passes the Acid 2 test only when run on webstandards.org, but fails if you run it on almost any mirror. The discussion further continued with speculation that MS had hardcoded a workaround specifically for the test and was "cheating". This turned out to be untrue and the reason was that webstandards.org references a page that exists incorrectly but the mirrors reference a page that doesn't exist. Both cases should be handled, but IE8 beta fails on the latter.
Probably people were modding the post down because it was factually incorrect. A better way to deal with the problem is probably to post a factual response, but several people have done so and those posts have not been modded high enough so that the facts are more easily read than the misleading evidence presented in the post you are asking about. Either that or a dozen people with mod points just groaned and thought, "do we have to go through all this again?"
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Yes, you don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the browsers are getting to that 100% point. Acid2 was not built to check 100% compliance, at that would have been useless. Not that the main browsers are reaching 100%, Acid2 is becoming useless, and Acid3 is necessary to see who has the best compliance. To use your school analogy, consider Acid2 to be the second grade. It is important to achieve that level, but when you do, you can expect the 3rd grade to follow it.
(And if your opinion of public schools is as low as mine, you are welcome to substitute "second grade" with level of knowledge that a 7 year old should have.
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Re:Very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
This might fit in well with Slashdot groupthink, but it doesn't fit in well with reality.
Back when Internet Explorer 6 was being developed, they were in direct competition with Netscape. Internet Explorer 6, when it was released was probably the best browser around when it came to supporting CSS. And you want us to believe that the explanation for 6 being worse than 5.5 in this test was deliberate sabotage by Microsoft?
They abandoned Internet Explorer development when they won the browser war. Sure, at that point you can make a case for them not wanting to be compatible. But at that point, they weren't developing Internet Explorer at all, so you can't use it as an explanation for Internet Explorer getting worse. And when Internet Explorer development was restarted, they were responding to a call for improved standards support,which they have delivered on.
I'm sorry, but deliberate sabotage is a ridiculous way of explaining this. Remember, the Acid tests are designed to trigger flaws in popular browsers. Of course it's going to target Internet Explorer 6 and 7 bugs over ancient versions. Internet Explorer 5.5 is no longer popular, so what's the point in ferreting out bugs for the Acid3 test? The real surprise is that people didn't expect this result.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it depends on when you consider the war to have ended, but the important point is that Internet Explorer 6 was indeed a marked improvement in standards support over Internet Explorer 5.5, so it's silly to say that it deliberately does worse in a test written the best part of a decade later. If Microsoft were trying to do worse with Internet Explorer 6, then they failed.
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Re:Very simple (Score:5, Interesting)
because they lost the bet. Microsoft expected the force of millions of dollars in propaganda to succeed against those annoying amateurs. But guess what, the amateurs are winning. The book of Mozilla explains it much more elegantly.
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Re:Very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Celik Strikes Back (Score:5, Informative)
No, it wasn't. Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows uses the Trident rendering engine. Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac uses the Tasman rendering engine. They are totally different codebases.
Actually, in most ways, Internet Explorer 6 has better standards support than Internet Explorer 5.x for the Mac.
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Re:Simple answers for simple questions (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:You shouldn't be supporting standards (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Group Policy integration
I can set browser settings (every single one that you see in IE's Internet options etc.) for a group of computers and fine-tune each setting to particular users. You don't want kids changing their proxy settings, you don't want them playing with trusted zones, you don't want them getting overwhelmed with dialogs when they log in for the f