RSSLatest Firefox beta passes Acid2 test, IE8 claims to pass also
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published December 20, 2007, 2:32 PM
After a screenshot on MSDN appeared to show an IE8 beta passing an accepted Web standards test, some came to the only conclusion they could: that the test had to be broken.
A test created by the Web Standards Project advocacy group for visually gauging the compliance of Web browsers with published standards, appears to have been passed by a beta of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, according to a recent post on the IE developer team's blog. And a test this morning by BetaNews of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 for Windows Vista, released on Wednesday, clearly shows it passes as well.
The Acid2 test uses a multitude of standards-compliant instructions, perhaps in an intentionally though otherwise unnecessarily complex fashion, to produce the image of a somewhat geeky-looking cartoon happy face. If a browser fails to execute the instructions properly, the rendering looks instead like someone accidentally launched their Wii controller into their TV tube.
If confirmed, the passing of the Acid2 test by both betas could mark a significant milestone. For comparison's sake, BetaNews tried the Acid2 test on fully patched versions of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 for Windows XP. The results were somewhat less than stellar.
On Firefox 2.0.0.11 running in Windows XP, the background did not light up red, which is apparently an indicator that the browser has no reason to believe something is horribly wrong here. Obviously, there is.
Internet Explorer build 7.0.5730.11 at least apparently knows something has gone wrong, which is why the background has lit up red. Notice the awkward presence of the spinner dial control, from out of nowhere.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 2, running on Windows Vista, shows us precisely how the face should appear when the test is passed with flying colors. Or more accurately, "flying color:" If absolutely everything works, the little fellow's nose will light up blue when you point to it. Here, even the glowing nose test passes muster.
Surprisingly, rather than gloat on the IE8 team's success in apparently also passing the Acid2 test, its general manager, Dean Hatchamovitch, instead downplayed the whole test as not being nearly as important as the overall goal that is the theme of his company's effort to play nice with the European Commission.
"When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support?" Hatchamovitch wrote, The Web has many kinds of standards - true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more...Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people 'consider most important for the future of the Web.'
"The key goal (for the Web Standards Project as well as many other groups and individuals) is interoperability," he continued. "As a developer, I'd prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers. Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most."
After news broke of IE8's achievement yesterday, beta testers registered with Mozilla said they noticed their Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 versions failed. That revelation immediately led some to wonder if "the test broke," and provoked one participant to post an alternate version of the test that "fixed" it so that their beta would pass. (In BetaNews tests, our Beta 2 version passed the Acid2 test that testers claimed was "broken.")
The strange, if accurate, turn of events led at least one tester to post a conspiracy theory: "Maybe MS just asked for the site to be changed slightly so they could take a couple of screenshots."
I have made my final decision on what my only browser will be and that is Seamonkey. It's fast, stable and has an excellent built-in downloader. It also does a great job of rendering. Firefox is a game I no longer want to play.
Score: 0
|BN should block any posting of news about web browsers. It seems impossible to have an intelligent conversation, let alone a debate, over the merits of web browsers. It always sparks the usual back-and-forth rhetoric about which one is best, blah blah blah. Who cares. Let's argue over ice cream flavors also.
Score: 0
|I install firefox .11 but not 3 beta 1 and beta 2 why does my XP Pro SP2 accept it no do I have to install SP3 RC then use betas. No I never install new versions because need to stay what we have many of security programs tells us our products are valid on what they have listed on thier programs softwares. See you soon.
Score: 0
|About the xperteleven.com thing..
Well I'm using the latest stable version of Opera. This site still doesn't open up properly Its all scattered and stuff.. Any idea how to fix it?
It works perfectly on all the other browsers.. except Opera..
HELP!
Score: 0
|I dont see what the big deal is... Opera has passed this test for a year now...
Score: 0
|What's the big deal? Safari has passed it for over 2 years.
Score: 0
|Just took the acid2 test and it worked fine for me. Minefield 3.0b3pre xpsp2
Score: 0
|Can you say Opera!
Score: 0
|It was broke because it depends on checking a url for part of the test and the site and the URL changed.
Score: 0
|Firefox 3 Beta 2 does not pass:
http://img138.imageshack...g138/6642/2acid2az1.png
Score: 0
|works flawless in Opera 9.25 for me (xp sp2). No need for alpha builds and unfinished betas :)
Score: 0
|I really like the new beta. It takes very little time to adapt to it. All my systems have tons of RAM, so I'm not worried about resource usage. The system I'm on now has a quad core processor.
Score: 0
|How much difference do you notice between a quad core and a dual core? I was thinking about upgrading to a quad core, but I decided to wait on the 45nm processors to come out. Also I am not sure but I think DDR3 RAM is not too far away.
Score: 0
|where do you find the IE8 beta ?
Score: 0
|I'm pretty certain he means Firefox 3 Beta 2.
Score: 0
|I don't know anything about the dual cores performance but I do know that DDR3 is already out. There are a few Intel based motherboards that support it.
Score: 0
|the alternate url for the test works perfect in firefox 3 beta 2 and opera 9.5 alpha on vista and it's really messed up in ie7.
but that doesn't mean firefox 3 is free of rendering errors. some sites that worked in ff2 are broken in ff3
Score: 0
|"Internet Explorer build 7.0.5730.11 at least apparently knows something has gone wrong, which is why the background has lit up red."
oh boy, nothing could be more far from the truth. Please do your homework before writings about topics like this.
The acid test combines lots and lots of tests that check for things like correct errorhandling and advanced formatting for both HTML and CSS. If a browser fails some aspects of the test, then the layout breaks down and some other parts of the page, that are _engineered_ *into the test page* will show up in broken browsers. Thus, the red background is an indicator of how *broken* IE7 is. The leaking red background is just some - usually invisible - formatting that the ACID2 page authors added to the page when putting together their test page, so that something red and screwy would become visible if a browser is broken in certain respects. Firefox2 is oviously *much* closer to getting Acid2 right than IE7.
Also, (as others have pointed out), nightlies of Firefox3 seem to have been passing Acid2 for a year or so, which can be verified because these nightlies can and could be downloaded publicly.
OTOH, IE8 is a private, in-development version, that nobody can get their hands on and about which nobody knows the overall state of maturity except that it seems to have been hacked forward to a state where the acid test page shows up (which means something because ACID2 really is a pretty nasty browser stress-test that encompasses some features which are simply not there in IE7, but it's far from saying whether IE8 is really mature, stable and overall reasonably standards-compliant).
And concerning the official ACID2 test page. YES - the PAGE is broken. One of the aspects it tests is handling of 404 errors by browsers. It refers to nonexisting pages to test if browsers handle missing resources correctly.
But for some stupid reason, their server seems to have been misconfigured to return the HTTP code 200 even if the requested resource is missing. This means that browsers gets the impression that the missing resource does actually exist and thus this misconfiguration is breaking the test even for browsers with *correct* error handling. This is not a deficiency in Firefox3 betas or Opera or Safari or any other browser which *can* render the test page. Those browsers can render the test page if it is served as intended (and others have pointed out the URL for a working mirror of the acid2 test page).
Score: 0
|Firefox 3 has been passing the acid2 test since it was an early alpha...
Score: 0
|I've been running the nightlies for a couple of months and none have passed.
Score: 0
|the other link works on my firefox 3 b2. it though screws up my proxy server by locking my account sometimes like other firefox versions.
I prefer k-meleon .. best build of gecko
Score: 0
|I use to use Fire Fox, then I notice memory leaks, and went to IE 7.
Perhaps my surfing habits of changed, or IE7 is actually more secure then people claim.
Score: 0
|IE 7 isn't much more secure than IE 6. IE 7 also crashes a lot.
Score: 0
|Not if you are smart.
Score: 0
|Wrong works great here never crashed.
Score: 0
|I have only seen IE7 crash due to incompatible plugins. I've actually only seen IE6 truly "crash" on its own when viruses exploit security vulnerabilities in it, and of course the numerous problems it had with handling broken plugins was simply atrocious.
IE7 not much more secure than IE6? Do you run IE7's Internet Zone at Medium security or something?
There's a huge difference in security between IE6 and IE7 at default settings, and sure--force IE6 to run at high security for the Internet Zone and IE6 is pretty safe, but IE7's "Medium-High" security makes a huge difference over IE6's "Medium"...
Score: 0
|I find everything pretty funny with the "render wars." I have two extensions in Firefox that make pages render exactly the way I want them to render, and that ain't a gonna change in the future. The pages may look ugly from the designer's perspective, but that is how I want to browse the web...
Score: 0
|Makes me wonder if IE7 is even worth upgrading to?????
Score: 0
|If you haven't by now no way. The only situation I might is if you use Outlook for email, I think earlier versions of outlook use IE as their render engine.
Before I would do that I would turn off html in mail anyway.
Score: 0
|Here is a working mirror of the Acid2 test... in the current live one, a referenced page returns a wrong status code which breaks the test (hope the hoster of this page doesn't mind...)
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/
Edit: Whoops, someone already linked it. Oh well, consider this a bump for those who might miss it.
Score: 0
|Love editorials with weasel words, very professional.
Score: 0
|I wish all of this was sorted out from the beginning, imagine how good it would be now.
Score: 0
|Yeah, the Acid2 test is ****ed in Opera 9.25 for me. They seem to be having some sort of issue.
Score: 0
|Didn't pass on mine, but according to Wikipedia:
"As of December 19, 2007, the ACID2 test is broken and does not pass in any compliant browser."
Score: 0
|Because Wikipedia is the ultimate source of knowledge in the world, lol.
Score: 0
|It's a darn-sight better than your sarcasm powers.
Score: 0
|Well aren't you clever. If you had actually read it you would see that there is link to their sources. Opera doesn't pass it now either, nothing does. It is in fact broken, and all you've done is made yourself look foolish, lol.
https://bugzilla.mozilla..._bug.cgi?id=289480#c172
Score: 0
|Yeah, this explains why it didn't look right in MY Firefox 3b2... I KNEW I was right about remembering that it was supposed to pass.
Score: 0
|Opera users..
go to http://www.xperteleven.com
does this site open properly?
Score: 0
|Yes it does. I am using 9.5 beta
Opened left side links and right side tree without problem.
The only sites I found Opera fails to render are those using nasty activex objects or "secure" pages, mostly from banks that explicity check client browser looking for IE. The funny thing is IE is the most insecure browser but... well, some blind corps work that way. I reccomend to avoid such sites when posible.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention some video sites using WM technology fails to display embebeed multimedia options in opera, not big deal anyway.
Score: 0
|And this site is standard compliant or fixed to be the most browser compliant?
Score: 0
|Works great for me (Opera 9.25, xp sp2). Check your own system maybe?
Score: 0
|A Microsoft product complies with standards!
Good thing I was sitting down.
Score: 0
|You know you could have posted the link to the video that the IE Team and Channel 9 did on the IE8 test rather than make it sound like their claim was unfounded. They have live video of the developers going to the web site and clicking the damn link.
http://channel9.msdn.com...post.aspx?postid=367207
Score: 0
|Thanks for sharing!
Score: 0
|The Acid2 test page on the main webstandards.org site is broken right now (they had a server change). Try this alternate URL: http://www.hixie.ch/test...l/acid/002-no-data/#top
Firefox 3 Beta 2 passes Acid2.
Score: 0
|No it doesn't.
http://img138.imageshack...g138/6642/2acid2az1.png
Score: 0
|Strangely I was using an RC of 3.0b2 a few days ago and it passed 100%. In my install of the official 3.0b2 release, its slightly broken :(
Score: 0
|Firefox does appear to pass the test from the following link http://www.webstandards....les/acid2/test_1-1.html which is v1.1 of acid test.
Score: 0
|Yawn, notice the article fails to even mention Opera, which has passed this test now for over a year..
You lot really are technophobes...
Score: 0
|why should it? the article's about firefox and ie ... not opera.
Score: 0
|Why mention a browser with less market share than apple has in the Computer market? Its not news. Opera might be the best browser in the world, but no one has heard of it and no one cares.
Score: 0
|Well, IT JUST WORKS.
Score: 0
|it doesnt mention webkit either but you dont see me butthurt over the fact that it's been acid2 compliant since 2.0.3 (think that was the point release that did it). if this helps standards compliance in IE, it's a WELCOME change. Lord knows that browsers broken as hell. I want them to adopt MORE standards, like those for interpreting and traversing xml nodes. That'd be stellar, seeing as how, you know, xml is fairly popular and all with all those neat "ajax" sites and such.
Score: 0
|PS, i just tested safari 3 on leopard and its slightly borked on the eyes. maybe they'll fix it in 10.5.2
Score: 0
|I WAS ABOUT TO ASK THE SAME.
To those saying "why should it mention Opera":
DON'T TRY TO TURN A BLIND EYE ON IT MORONS! Of course it should be mentioned, because it is one of the (if not THE) highest quality browsers in the scene, and has passed this test long before the rest. It's not about firefox and ie only, but about them related to the Acid2 test.
About whoever comes with the market share or plug-ins topic, it's only derivative or flaming talking.
As an Opera user, I don't need any market share or plug-in.
T h A r t i s t
Score: 0
|Yes. It's called News, not Olds.
Are you that PS3 guy..?
Score: 0
|Yah he is...
Score: 0
|nah, it's fine with the FIXED Acid2 posted above - So now Safari (1st) Opera (2nd) and FF (3) are compliant - maybe IE will be 3 years after Safari got there...
Score: 0
|