Acid3 Race In Full Swing, Opera Overtakes Safari

enemi writes "Just a few days after Safari released version 3.1, Opera employee David Storey writes on his blog that they've overtaken Apple's browser in the Acid3 test. In the race to be the first to reach the reference rendering, Opera's software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%. He also noted the implemented features will not make a public appearance in the following weeks, because they are getting close to releasing Opera 9.5. That version has been under public testing since September and the new CSS3 color modes and font rendering features might further delay this. They will probably show the score in a preview build soon and wait for a post 9.5 stable build to release the new features to the public." Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z : Opera is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%. Update: 03/27 by J : Public build r31356 of WebKit (Safari's rendering engine) is at 100%.

Competition - gotta love it

[PhrostyMcByte]

'nuff said.

Does public release matter?

[NiKnight3]

Which is a better title: "First browser to reach 100/100" or "First publicly-released browser to reach 100/100"? I might argue for the latter. If anything, I think this gives the WebKit team more of a spark to reach the end.

Re:too late

[The Ancients]

Until I can browse and see 100/100 on my screen, I don't see it as too late. 98/100 is the highest I've seen when browsing http://acid3.acidtests.org/ [acidtests.org]

Apparently Duke Nukem Forever is a great game, too...

The Next Milestone

[powerlord]

Okay, So Opera Firefox and Safari all are shooting for compliance with Acid3.

The next major milestone though, right after "X Achieves 100% compatibility in nightly builds" is "X releases version X of browser to the masses/into the wild, capable of passing Acid3 test".

Passing it "in the lab" is one thing, declaring it in a build "ready for release" is another.

Re:The Next Milestone

[The Ancients]

Either way, the consumer wins. The faster development builds get it right, the faster it will end up in a shipping, public release, build.

Lets give the developers all the motivation we can to get this to happen. If that means a pissing contest of nightly builds, let 'em go for it, I say.

Who cares who's first?

[Vellmont]

This isn't a race, it's a competition.

What do I care who's first? What I care about is who has the best browser that complies with standards. That may also include render speed, stability, javascript compatibility, security, or whatever. "Who's first" is about the thing I care about the least.

Re:Old News :)

[umrain]

Just to be clear, reaching 100/100 is not equal to passing Acid 3.

To pass the test,a browser must use its default settings, the animation has to be smooth, the score has to end on 100/100, and the final page has to look exactly, pixel for pixel, like this reference rendering.

Opera has not currently made any claims about the animation smoothness that i have seen, and the screenshot is still missing a space after the first comma. Obviously reaching the 100/100 goal is great progress but they are not quite across the finish line yet.

Re:too late

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, Opera can do it, but isn't going to release the capability -- wonderful.

Safari 3.1 is a full release, and Firefox is a publicly available beta release. In my book Opera is losing the race. The race is silly, but Opera is still losing.

Incorrect update

[Midnight Thunder]

Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z [slashdot.org] : Safari is now at 100% [opera.com], apparently, with Safari close behind at 98% [slashdot.org].

Looks like someone wasn't reading what they were writing. The links are right though.

Re:I won't care how Acid3 compliant Opera gets ...

[Anonymous Coward]

God, I hope not. The number of pages that pop up an annoying "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE THIS PAGE" alert is getting huge.

I NAVIGATED AWAY FROM THE PAGE, YES, I'M SURE. NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Web pages are not applications, no matter how much the stupidass Web2.0 garbage wants them to be. You don't need to know when I leave your page.

What about IE?

[Chabil Ha']

This is really cool that competition has provoked a response from the browsers to be compliant, but until IE is compliant, does it make a lick of difference? The combined market share of these ACID3 browsers is ~25%, so in the scheme of things, I'm still not going to be developing sites that take advantage of the newest features.

IE8 is still puttering around with ACID2...so I hate to sound like the cynic...

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[recoiledsnake]

Bad form to reply to myself, but just wanted to add that this reminds me of the days of Netscape in which features were adding in a slapdash manner and with hardly any design or planning, which lead of the extreme bloat and memory leaks which the Firefox developers are still trying to get rid of to this very day(have you checked out Firefox's source code? Believe me, it's not pretty). I bet IE's code was as bad or worse because of the browser wars and was riddled with tons of security vulnerabilities which seem to have lessened only over the past few years. KHTML and Opera on the other hand seem to have developed and maintained a lean codebase(Opera had a total rewrite for version 7 IIRC).

Re:*tap* *tap* ... Is this thing on?

[Blakey Rat]

Maybe they're too busy adding actual features to the browser instead of competing in pointless tests to show how well it'll handle crazy error conditions that'll never actually happen on the web-at-large. God forbid.

100/100 Doesn't Mean Much If Pages Don't Render

[qazwart]

I'm very happy to see both Safari and Opera take the Acid3 test so seriously. However, despite Safari's 98/100 score, I still have problems with Midas/DocumentMode issues. This affects the basic installation of TinyMCE, an extremely popular editor for blogging software. It is used in Confluence, Joomla, Mambo, and many other software projects.

I also know there are places where Safari simply renders pages illegibly. I've seen this on Joomla forums where Safari cannot render the boxes on top of a forum post correctly (see for an example. Here "home", "threaded views", "home", and "help" are not rendered correctly in Safari.

I know most of this has to do with non-standard behavior first instituted by Microsoft (who else), but IE represents about 80% of the browser market, so when Microsoft creates a standard like Midas/DocumentMode, it becomes an important part of the Web. FireFox and Opera have no problems with this. Unfortunately, Safari, the browser that hews so closely to WC3 standards simply cannot be used on many websites.

Re:I'll probably burn in karma-land for this

[MrNemesis]

So I'm not sure even the "competition is good for everyone" argument particularly applies here.

If even the two Opera users that there are* can keep Firefox on their toes, and by extension Microsoft and Apple, then everybody wins.

*In this thread at least, those two Opera users appear to be myself and whitelarker. For me and the way I browse, Firefox doesn't even come close, but I believe the point of this addendum, Acid $integer tests and Firefox is and always has been that whatever browser the user is using shouldn't matter when everyone sticks to the standards.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Zebra_X]

I don't agree that this is not clear.

you know the right side is a boolean expression, and that you are assigning the result of the expression to the left.

in fact, it is actually more clear, and less error prone to do it the first way - there is never an opportinity to "accidently" assign the wrong boolean value to the variable where as in the second case it is up to the programmer to properly interpret the boolean comparison and assign the proper outcome to the variable.

Re:That's good, but don't get too carried away

[BenoitRen]

If they really were dedicated to web standards, they wouldn't have implemented IE's proprietary coloured scroll bars. Bah.

Re:Standards - gotta love em

[hackstraw]

Remember the days when websites would yell at you telling you that you needed to use a certain version of an OS, with a certain version of a certain browser, with the latest pre-alpha VRML plugin and 1024x768 resolution?

Now, you don't even need a computer to browse the web.

That is progress.

I use Safari at home and Firefox at work (both with flash blockers), and I can do anything.

Back when Microsoft tried to take over the web, I had many issues with many sites. I don't remember the last problem I've had viewing a website.

And this is without government regulation or anything.

Next up, standards for multimedia on the web.

Re:too late

[hedwards]

But, Opera is losing the more important race for market share.

A lot of the things that the Acid tests check for aren't necessary for day to day web browsing. And some of them like the 3d aren't used at all for simple things like email, and basic dynamic content.

Sure, I'd rather have a browser that supports all of the standards, but realistically if the browser supports things that I don't need, it's unlikely that I'll ever notice.

Sorry to sound like a zealot, but...

[porneL]

The "zealotry" is answer to unfair dissing of Opera. The company is working really hard on their browser and promotion of web standards, and yet from the general public all they get is "x%? I don't give a shit".

• Hakon Lie, Opera CTO is co-author of CSS and initiator of Acid2 test,
• Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5, was Opera employee when the work started, and is creator of Acid3 test,
• Opera invented/popularized MDI (pre-tabbed) browsing, mouse gestures, zoom and shrink-to-fit, HTML+CSS+JS on mobiles (including non-smartphones!), views-based e-mail client (think GMail),
• They actively fight Microsoft by filing complaints to EU, sued them for MSN, ridiculed IE with Acid tests and b0rk editions, fight IE-only websites with Open The Web campaign and they are getting excellent SVG, CSS and native video support to offer free and open alternatives to Silverlight and Flash.

In the US the browser alone might not be directly relevant, but Opera Software influenced the market quite a bit: IE8 was released soon after Opera filed complaint to EU and IE8's big news is passing Opera CTO's Acid2 test. Opera taken lead role in WHATWG and started implementing [X]HTML5. Before that W3C didn't consider any major revisions of HTML4 or XHTML1.

They really deserve some more respect.

Re:Standards - gotta love em

[dryeo]

And this is without government regulation or anything.

I could of sworn there has been antitrust cases over MS and IE. Both in the USA and EU.
I'd say the antitrust case, even though just a slap on the wrist, did slow MS down and that is one of the reasons that the internet has improved.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[Durandal64]

No, you don't write code only once. You revise it, over and over again. If you suddenly changed your mind and wanted the opposite behavior (like, if you changed m_allowFontSmoothing to m_disableFontSmoothing), you'd have to change two lines and two constants instead of just replacing an exclamation mark with an equal sign. Generally, the fewer places you manipulate a variable, the better. And avoiding unneeded branching is generally a good thing, too.

In the first example, you're expressing a relationship between two variables in one line, containing one assignment and one comparison. In the second, you are using one comparison, two assignments and branch. It's less efficient, and the relationship isn't as explicit.

Re:Is anyone else concerned about the 'hacks' ?

[BZ]

> What you are seeing here are not crazy hacks

Well, http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/changeset/31322 [webkit.org] would be a change which special-cases one particular font for different handling from all other fonts because that font happens to be the one Acid3 uses.

Either the thing that's being done with all the other fonts is OK (and the test is wrong, and there should be no need to special case) or the thing being done with all the other fonts is not OK, and this is a crazy hack...

This is not to say that all the changes are like this, by any means. But with the closed-source browsers, who knows?