Acid3 Really?

Acid is a test to push 'compensation failures'... For example if there is no ending "table" tag, then the table SHOULD NOT DISPLAY.

It is NOT a test about standards.

IE has always performed poorly on ACID type of test going back to 3.0 and 4.0 days, as the developers at the time decided that if the page is missing a "table" end tag, to go ahead and show the table, as it is 'expected' to be there. (Remember people were using dial-up with flaky connections, and there were poorly coded web sites in the 90s.)

This is what made IE more popular than Netscape in version 4.0 of each browser, as people that got bumped off or were visiting a flaky web site missing a tag, they STILL got to see the table and the content, where Netscape would show a blank page.

Which was better? Technically Netscape was doing it right, but users were more happy seeing the table even with a flaky connection that didn't give them the end "table" tag.

So ACID isn't about 'compliance' but how the browser handles failures.

So when people go Woo Hoo Safari gets 100%, that just means that Safari fails as expected when getting malformed content. So YAY, Safari fails perfectly.

As for the point of IE9 and what the team is trying to accomplish, WATCH the video, it is NOT ABOUT ACID3.

There are problems between Chrome, Firefox and Safari as they render things like the border example in the video. They are all technically 'standards compliant' but all render the border differently where IE9 renders it as expected.

Bring up this demo in your various browsers to see for yourself:
http://ie.microsoft.com/...rderRadius/Default.html

This is what is important as even with the standards there are overlapping problems that even 'standards' don't compensate for; so watch further into the video with the Falling Balls demo, again HTML and SVG are technically rendering with full standards, but when they 'overlap' there is no standard way the browsers handles this, and in the example IE9 handles it as the developer would expect, where Firefox doesn't.

I get so tired of the holy IE sucks regarding 'standards' argument when people have NO clue to the depth of the topic and how complex the 'different' standards are and how even the 100% compliant browsers like Safari and Chrome and Opera FAIL in merging of the standards.

This is where the MS IE team is trying to get everyone on board with at least discussing standards of merging standards - again watch the video from MIX.

As for everyone here going, 55 out 100, that means MY browser of choice is the greatest and far better than IE and IE9, here is a chart for you to consider and this is just a taste of the complexity of web standards.
http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

That is indeed some of the Acid test's testing methodology, yes. It is of course not entirely about failure testing. It's not the entire spec of CSS 2.1 for Acid2, which I'm sure you know, but it goes some way to making sure that painting order is correct, the object tag is working as it should, PNGs with alpha transparency display correctly, the W3C box model is implemented correctly, and all the positioning types work correctly.
In fact, for Acid2 failure testing is a relatively minor part of the test.

I admit I know less about Acid3, so this may very well be the case.

a lot of you are missing the point, and it's not even mentioned in this article what the point of this is. Besides showing that it's working it's way up on the Acid 3 test, they are also including demos to show the perfomance gains by using Direct2D and DirectWrite rendering (aka GPU accelerated rendering).

Do you guys only depend on betanews for all your info? There are a ton of sites with more detail about the tech preview than this one. Here's one for starters: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie...ble-for-developers.aspx

Technical difficulties today prevented me from doing my usual full-feature rundown at my usual speed, and for that, I apologize. I replaced some burnt-out equipment, and now I have the complete story online, with the big points you mentioned and more.

http://www.betanews.com/...alfway-there/1268780066

-SF "Honey, Is That Smoke?...What Are You Cooking Over There?" 3

A step in the right direction, which will benefit new users. However my browser of choice runs on every system in the house. (and no, not Firefox, Chrome or Safari)

If you've ever worked on a project that involved a lot of backend coding that didn't have any real GUI yet but the client demanded proof that work was truly being done you'll better appreciate this release. They probably lost a week or two from their real jobs just getting the renderer in a basic shell with an installer to have a POC so someone higher up could say "see, we really are working on something".

@gregmlr - do you understand the definition of technology preview?

This isn't a beta, it isn't an alpha. So stop being an idiot.

...have you seen how bad Internet's Explorer's numbers have been in the past? This is a demo to show that the company is trying to build a default browser that customers can/will use.

Yes...because mom and dad will switch to internet explorer simply because of a higher acid score. Good call!

You lost all cred when you said Safari is your browser of choice.

Because an ACID3 test is the end all be all of the Internet? You, sir, fail more than IE.

Safari is the slowest besides IE. So yes sounds like a fanboy. I'm fascinated they got 55 %. Opera did the same thing when they showed off their 100 %. I like Chrome and Opera for browsing, but Flock (Firefox) for buying things. via Roboform. If Roboform ever got itself to run on Chrome, there's a chance I'd uninstall Firefox, but not Flock. Use Twitter.

I guess you dont read much. HTML 5 is what Apple loves, flash is what it hates.

@skimore - that's just a nonsense comment. Apple is not stopping support for HTML5.

Think some members like (Skimore ) here can't figure out what's satire and whats not and mingle right on in. Only reason I've heard of HTML5 is how much silly Steve Jobs pushing it instead of Flash.

I eagerly went to install the preview, but alas it wouldn't install on XP, requires Vista SP2. So sad. I wonder if it co-exists with IE8 so I can run both?

Heh...

Barely works. There's no "real" UI to it yet even.. (To borwse, you have to use the menu...no buttons/addressbar).

Formatting is off..this reply appeared *above* your comment...but still indented. Amusing.

Slow....but then, it's not even a beta yet, afaik.

Sure won't be replacing anything at this time, but that was expected.

OK, I installed it on my Windows 7 test computer. Download page makes it look really good, but such a work in progress. I measured a couple of websites and it appears about 50% slower than IE8. It leaves IE8 alone, so its safe to install without messing things up. Bit painful to use without an address bar or tabs or anything. You have to go file open to goto a web page. No history or bookmarks. Really just a very minimal interface around the rendering engine, which is in a very early stage.

XP won't be getting it because it's on extended support this means it only gets security updates no new features. All versions of Windows on mainstream will get it, a.k.a Vista and 7.

I'm glad it won't install on XP. By the time IE9 ships this year, XP will be nearly 10 years old. Why does MS need to keep so much backwards compatability. I am impressed IE8 runs on XP!

Problem is that Vista didn't ship till Jan, 2007 and then was a complete failure. That means nearly all computers sold between 2001 and 2009 are running Windows XP. Most of these would probably have trouble with Windows 7, due to weird old devices. Computers last much longer now. Most people don't upgrade their OS, just get a new one when they get a new computer. Seems to me that if IE9 has any chance it need to support XP. There are just too many out there.

"Most of these would probably have trouble with Windows 7, due to weird old devices."

Most OEM computers do not contain "Weird old devices" unless they were put there by the end-user. OEM=commodity and MSFT did a good job (this time around) of supporting that.

Yeah gotta use open then the webpage, but not really slow. It's really meant though to go to the default test page and not a website. When I click a link on a website Flock opens up (Firefox variant for Social dweebs like me)

Still a Vista Business fan. I won't go back to XP. Maybe to 7 someday. But it looks and feels just like Vista but with some drawbacks and some improvements. (all the improvements relate to the thumbnails) SP2 ehhh not a big fan of. Vista SP1 wasn't horrid. By the beginning of December, Windows 7 had become so corrupted I couldn't use it anymore. Do'h. Vista failed because of bad word of mouth. Not because it sucked. Maybe upgrading was a pain for older comptuers, but if they are still using that same older computer, it's gonna be a bigger pain because there isn't an upgrade path from XP to 7. The only way I can thing of is using one of those easy transfer USB cables. Which I used on my dads new laptop. Same version of Vista too. We don't agree on much but he hasn't had any problems with Vista. The problem in his case is his new laptop is 64 bit. So now some hardware doesn't work.

Not really. Dell still refuses to release a complete updated driver for the Nvidia video card my Latitude D820 uses. (let alone release an updated one for Vista. Nvidia has the updated driver for my model except for ones installed in Dells.)

Have you tried the 110M Driver from NVIDIA?

Agreed!