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.

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

[The Ancients]

Error establishing a database connection

That was fast. Even for slashdot.

Too late for IE8?

[riceboy50]

This might be coming onto the scene a little bit too late in order to complain about the upcoming IE8 not passing the test. It's a shame that this didn't come out last year.

Firefox

[BlowHole666]

success of Safari 3 (which originally scored 31, but is now Scoring 87/100) IE6, and IE7 (massive fail, of course)'."

Umm what did Firefox get on this? What about Opera? If you are going to report something why not report all the facts. You listed three browsers where are the other two+ ?

Re:Bad day for IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well, Mozilla is also just passing ACID2 in FF3 as well.

And does not pass ACID3.

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

[setagllib]

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]

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:Firefox 2.0.0.12

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on which build. 3.0b3 gets you 60/100. Supposedly the current beta 4 nightly builds do better.

Failure

[mrbah]

The Acid tests would be a lot more productive if they were oriented more towards the practical non-compliance issues than obscure ones. A back-asswards JavaScript implementation or a horrible box model is more of an issue than the inability to display base64 images encoded directly into the page markup. Total compliance is great, but it's much more pragmatic to get the fundamental issues fixed first.

Re:Geek version of a measuring contest?

[gerbalblaste]

No this is a measurement of compliance to international standards.

Re:Firefox

[CrazedWalrus]

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 test points out.

IE8 Cheats ACID2!!

[feld]

IE8 doesn't pass Acid2! I think it cheats!

Check it out quickly guys!

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ [webstandards.org] PASS

http://acid2.acidtests.org/ [acidtests.org] FAIL

The only thing different between these tests is a 404 link on about line 130 of the source. Is IE8 cheating?!!!

Web 2.0?

[Tatsh]

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'.

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

[Goaway]

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

Re:Perhaps....

[bunratty]

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:Unfair browser bashing?

[bunratty]

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.

What would be really useful....

[CodeShark]

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?

Re:Web 2.0? - My definition

[Tatsh]

"Web 2.0 is a bullshit buzzword made up to describe everything new that is happening on the web. It is mostly meaningless marketing speak. Treat it as such."

I agree, and thought this ever since I heard the term, so I hereby propose abolishment of the term.

Re:Firefox 2.0.0.12

[kamikaez]

This is a javascript / DOM test, not CSS.
It was developed by Netscape, so I guess they will do best.. Oh well..

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

[CaptainPinko]

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.

Re:Browser rundown

[bunratty]

When was Opera ever standards king? Before Opera 7 I couldn't use Opera because it couldn't reflow web pages correctly to handle DHTML. The Mozilla and IE of the day could handle reflow just fine. I couldn't use Opera 8 because it didn't support XSLT, and one website that I frequented used XSLT. The IE and Firefox of the day could handle XSLT just fine. Opera's got good standards support, generally about as good as Firefox or Safari, but it seems like it's often playing catch-up in at least one area. But standards king? I think not.