IE 5.5 Beats IE6 and IE7 On Acid 3

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.

Re:Uhhh

[Hassman]

hah. not really.

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.

safari

[sentientbrendan]

really seems to be kicking ass at 90%; granted it is from a nightly build and not an official release.

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.

Maybe this is obvious but...

[JimboFBX]

If there doesn't exist a program that can render your test correctly, then how do you know for sure you wrote it correctly to begin with?

Re:Very simple

[VGPowerlord]

When did the war actually end? I thought IE5 was the final nail in Netscape's coffin, which would make IE5.5 also after the war ended.

Re:Very simple

[Spy der Mann]

And they are bringing IE8 into compliance because...?

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.

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.
from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

Re:Very simple

[bunratty]

I was also using Mozilla all during 2001, when it was common on Slashdot for people so say that Mozilla 1.0 would never be released. I never thought that it was "doomed to failure". I saw it as the alternative browser with the most potential, even though Opera was more popular then. It had, and still has, far better standards support than IE. IE isn't even anywhere near catching up to the other popular browsers in standards support.

Re:mirrors not introduce change

[Bogtha]

But it was though. When you view the Acid test from the canonical address, there is no cross-domain request. When you view it from a mirror, there is. The fact that one of the mirrors happens to be webstandards.org is unimportant. That's not the publicised address for the test, it's an oversight that it's available from that URL at all. By making the unaltered HTML available on a host other than www.webstandards.org, the mirrors (including webstandards.org) are introducing a new factor into the test.

Re:Read that too fast...

[Naughty Bob]

A hand-coded version of Firefox hacked specifically to render Acid 3.

Why don't we all just use that then?