Submitted by “Since the test was officially announced recently, our core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.”
We love you Opera, keep up the good work.
I don’t love Opera….
Their app has many capabilities but their layout and integration is lacking.
http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/03/28/
Now released for anyone wanting to have a look.
Quick rundown:
* This is a literally “we coded this last night” result, it’s not a public build
* 100% won’t make it into Opera 9.5
* Safari nightlies are at 98%, there’s also no idea of when a next version will ship – I would personally guestimate, ~June
* this was a triumph, I’m making a note here, huge success!
* But: what really matters is who wil ship first
* Microsoft could care less, Acid 2 is the new Acid 3 to them.
+1 for portal reference
Why does it only matter who ships first? I don’t see how a few months is going to make that much of a difference. I don’t think we’ll see Safari or Opera users going “oh, the other browser has 100% ACID3 compliance, I’m going to switch.”
Well, it is important to be first for both Opera and Safari. They aim for more customers and they get positive exposure in the media by being first. It is also about credibility. They can now claim that they follow standards better than Firefox. Personally I think it is great that it is getting so much attention since it puts more pressure on IE to comply with web standards.
I also agree.
Maybe Firefox or IE will not lose their popularity if they do not become in 100% standards compliant, but it talk a lot about the care and polish they put into their work.
Occurs the same when you create a program that works with mouse clicks but does not understand anything about tab or arrows or short cuts… your program works and it does what it should do… but if your program supports arrow keys, tab keys, shortcuts, can be used for people with visual problems and have a lot of “polishment”, it talks about you and the dedication you put into your final product.
I fully agree.
It’s clear that standards compliance isn’t the measurement that defines popularity yet.
Firefox 2.x doesn’t even pass the Acid 2 test yet, and it’s not losing any popularity contests
It’s “good enough” in most peoples minds – and that’s what matters. Firefox has the added benefit of being open-source, which probably generates a lot more “selling power” to those who are “browser shopping”.
IE on the other hand doesn’t even seem to aspire to be competitive on standards compliance, nor does it have anything else going for it other than pure market share by default.
Opera and Safari are going to maybe make inroads among those who want to claim to have “the fastest browser” or “the most standards compliant browser” … but I guess it remains to be seen if that translates into real tangible market share or not.
I’m can’t wait for a cross-platform open-source webkit based KDE web browser. If the KDE people design it correctly then I believe that they could very quickly gain massive amounts of market share.
I have a sort of related question to this. If you make Firefox-like extensions for a GPL-licensed program would those extensions also have to be GPL? As I believe a KDE based web browser would have to be GPL in order to use the free version of QT.
I love the renewed browser wars. Hopefully the next “war” will occur in office suites between OpenOffice, KOffice, and GNOME Office.
Right. Besides, Opera was the first browser to ship with tabs around version 3.6X if memory serves me right (although they were slightly different of what we see today on most web browsers, more like a MDI-style app I think) but that didn’t stop the horde of clueless people giving credit to Mozilla for that.
And I have seen some people here on OSAlert of all places suggest once or twice that Firefox came with that first and then Seamonkey and other browsers copied that “incredibly useful innovation”, nonetheless…
Opera is against patents and they freely let people copy their features. A good deal of Firefox functionality and extensions are implementations of Opera-stuff.
Would be interesting if Opera was *not* against patents and held patents of all the stuff that they came up with.
Firefox(and probably other browsers as well) would be very different indeed.
Thankfully Opera instead of clinging onto patents instead try to drive forward and innovative.
100% pass with ‘remaining issues yet to be fixed’
Im not sure thats a 100% pass! Have you ever got 100% in an exam where some answers were not right?!?!?!
You can get 100% on an exam without knowing everything the course was supposed to teach you though. You just have know the stuff the exam happens to ask. I’m guessing they uncovered bugs and issues connected to the ACID3 test but weren’t directly tested by it.
It passes 100% of the tests (100/100), but is not yet a pixel-for-pixel match for the ACID3 test (missing a space, I believe). Pixel-for-pixel matching, and smooth rendering, are two corrollaries of 100% compatibility.
It’s still in beta stage, so they still have a chance to fix it (and maybe become a first official browser that passes acid3).
OTOH, tuning specifically for the test doesn’t mean that implementation of those features is robust (and that problems won’t be visible elsewhere).
I don’t think so, I’m afraid. FF3 is in beta mainly due to unfixed bugs. Major functionality will definitely not be added at this stage. And a jump from 50-60% ACID3 to 100% is not going to happen for 3.0.0. Later, perhaps, sure.
what is the point of the test, then?
ACID2 tested how to interpret even faulty code (how certain errors should be handled) – I assume ACID3 is the same.
Sure – one test can’t possibly cover every quirk; and definitely doesn’t dictate the behaviour of possibly related things, but if a 100% on the test does not guarantee what you are testing for (support of those standards), then it’s not a very good test anyway.
Edited 2008-03-27 02:47 UTC
Opera and Safari (and Firefox, for that matter) have to concern themselves with a heck of a lot of regression testing before they can release a final version with Acid3 support. It’s one thing to have features implemented 100%, it’s another to break 10% of all websites in doing so.
Unfortunately, the smaller the market share, like Safari and Opera, the greater the number of poorly-tested hacks are out there in the wild.
Perhaps the title of this news item should be changed. Reaching 100/100 is not enough for passing the Acid3 test. For example the rendered image has to match the reference image pixel for pixel. They didn’t achieve that yet.
It’s cool that Opera now supports Acid 3 but they aren’t really my concern. Opera, Safari and Firefox have been very good at supporting web standards and if I create a website that works in one it usually works in all.
What I’m concerned about is IE. Acid 3 also tests SVG, Opera has been the best browser when it comes to SVG support but IE doesn’t even have SVG support at all.
Anyway I’ll be playing with this once it hits mainstream builds, this is the type of thing I’ve been dreaming of, Flash killer features without a plugin.
now they only have to make an UI which does not terribly suck (in Mac OS X).
That’s some of the stuff that they’re working on.
Now I wouldn’t say that their GUI sucks on MacOSX(just tried Opera on it today). But it could definetely need some work, and that’s some of the things they’re been working on for version 9.50, better integration with OS interface. Personally I really hoper they’ll utilize the drawer for the sidepanel, that would make a lot of sense on IMO.
Mmm? I found it strange I was modded down^aEUR|
Does that mean there are some people that find Opera’s user experience on the Mac satisfactory? Is it really anyone’s browser of choice on that platform. Because at the end of the day that is what counts I guess.
From my part, what I meant is that while their work is impressive, I would say (without any real data to back it up though) that their Mac user base is probably rather slim, and I bet it has quite a lot to do of the quality of the user experience with the UI in spite of it being a browser that works.
Isn’t it a pity to have a heck of a car engine in a rather unatractive bodywork?
That is a lot of work there, well done guys working on Opera. I understand there little way to go, but well done!!!
Looking forward to Safari and FF getting there too… I’m not holding my breathe for IE8, but you never know, maybe the guys there are taking these things seriously too, lets hope so…
http://webkit.org/blog/173/webkit-achieves-acid3-100100-in-public-b…
100/100 and you can actually grab the build and test it yourself from their SVN server. Unlike Opera which is only an internal build.
And more, Webkit have a pixel-perfect rendering, which Opera has not yet.
Edited 2008-03-27 09:40 UTC
Pixel perfect only for the Acid 3 test, mind
http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/changeset/31322
This is good but how do we know this is not hard coded just for this test? Is there another web site coded with the same standards and have the test again?
For WebKit, we know because it is open-source : they linked the SVN commit for each bug they fixed, you can browse the sources if you want ^aEUR” or test the public build.
Opera is another thing. I really don’t believe Opera is cheating, but for all we know, their test results could be a simple screenshot…
See the arstechnica post:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/03/27/team-webkit-sq…
It appears that a bug has been fixed in the Acid3 test that drops Opera’s score back to 99. The comments at reddit.com suggest that this is because Opera has been coded to the test, not the spec.
http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6dj4d/comments/
Coding to the test rather than the spec would seeme to defeat the purpose of the test itself.
Look at some of the comments from the Webkit/Safari guys too. They code around a handling issue with the font used in Acid3.
Coding to the test rather than the spec again.
Well actually – it looks like they are basically removing the anti-aliasing of the font so that the rendered result will be “pixel-perfect”… I think that’s a stupid requirement for passing the test, personally.
During my daily visit to programming.reddit.com, I found this item that struck me as pretty amusing.
http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6dj0k/comments/
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-wor…
Acid3 is basically worthless
I was looking over the spreadsheet covering Mozilla’s Acid3 failures, and it struck me that very few of the fixes would substantially improve the Web or the browser. They are bugs and they will be fixed (except maybe SMIL… wtf?), but they don’t impact authors or users at all. Looks mostly like an opportunity for grandstanding about “commitment to standards.” I think testing createNodeIterator while text nodes don’t interoperate is both misguided and hypocritical.
Besides, commitment to standards is strong at Mozilla, where we don’t constantly seek to rubber stamp our own implementation.
There’s another reddit.com thread saying that since Firefox 3 is in its final stages of development, they will be fixing no Acid3 bugs for Firefox 3, which is a sensible policy.
http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6dk68/comments/
Edited 2008-03-27 17:43 UTC
Im not gonna call it useless, but if webkit can just selectively implement small portion of standard just for the test. There is something not right with it.
Its nice to reach 100/100, but by doing so in such a “pass just for the sake of passing” manner, is not meaningful.
Edited 2008-03-27 19:33 UTC
This is also my understanding of the Acid tests (yes, both 2 and 3 exercise unrealistic corner cases).
Thus, I’d rather a browser focused initially on supporting the most important standards properly *first* and then go back and fix the corner cases.
The approach mentioned – to freeze the FF3 code and work on Acid3 compliance later is absolutely reasonable. Why distract the developers with “fantasy-land” compliance issues while they have more important things to focus on now and here.
That said, I hope Mozilla/Gecko devs do at least work on some of the issues once the FF3 release is finished