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Article About "The Acid3 Test" For Browsers ...


Monroe

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Just came across this article dealing with browsers in yesterday's The Washington Post (12/02/2009) .... It talks about a test called The Acid3 Test that browsers should pass but all IE browsers fail. I will post a link here to the article ... would be nice for some input from you guys who might understand all this a lot better than myself ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?nav=hcmodule

and The Acid3 Test site .....

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

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As Google Backs Away From A Plug-in, Microsoft Rushes Towards One

MG Siegler

TechCrunch.com

Wednesday, December 2, 2009; 1:16 PM

Today at their Bing Fall Release event, Microsoft showed off some nice updates to their search engine, including further information about how the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook data integration will work. But by far the most interesting thing they showed was the new beta version of Bing Maps. While it looked very nice, the real reason why it was so interesting is what it requires: Silverlight.

This news comes just days after Google's revelation (thanks, in part, to our story on the upcoming Chrome for Mac beta) that they were backing away from supporting Gears in the future, in favor of HTML5. Gears is the software that Google created to allow users to use their applications while not connected to the web. But it's also a plug-in (for all browsers except Google's own Chrome for the PC). This is a big barrier to entry for many users. And it's something that creates problems developing apps around it if say, a user doesn't have Gears installed.

So it's good to see Google step away from a plug-in even if it's no longer proprietary (originally called "Google Gears," they have since open-sourced it). And it makes what Microsoft is doing even more frustrating.

With Silverlight, Microsoft continues to make it clear that they intend to use this web application framework, which they developed, to power much of what they are doing on the web going forward. Again, the problem here is that not only does Microsoft control this, but it requires a plug-in to use. Sure, they've made the plug-in available to most browsers, including the ones by rivals Google and Apple, but it's still a plug-in. It's something that's going to stop everyone from seeing the same web no matter which browser they use.

This has of course long been an issue with Microsoft. Despite a clear shift within the rest of the industry toward web standards, Microsoft long played difficult with its Internet Explorer browser. They could afford to, and maybe you could even argue that it was in their interest to, because they were so dominant. It was only when a standards-based browser, Mozilla's Firefox, started biting off significant chunks of IE's market share that Microsoft shifted their position to play more nicely with standards.

But even today, they still don't play that nicely. As you can see in this video about IE9, they are still nowhere near passing the Acid3 browser test. Safari, Opera, and Chrome have all now achieved 100/100 scores on the test. Firefox has gotten a 96/100. IE? Well IE8 (the current version) gets a 20/100. And IE9, which isn't out yet, only gets a 32/100. You can try to argue (which Microsoft does) that much of the test is meaningless to everyday browsing, but the fact remains that all its major competitors are able to pass it or are on the verge of passing it.

A humorous aside about the video linked to above is that while it's a talk about Microsoft's commitments to standards and interoperability with IE9, you need Silverlight to play it.

When asked about Microsoft's shift towards requiring Silverlight for applications such as the new Bing Maps, officials from the company basically stated that they're doing it because they had to. AJAX, the technology that powers many of the other web apps in existance today, simply isn't powerful enough to do what they want, they reason ? continuing on that it's not about using a proprietary technology, but using the best technology out there.

The problem with this once again goes back to the idea of a unified web. If some web apps require plug-ins, the web is not going to be as seamless as it should be. And that's why HTML5 is potentially so interesting. Because advanced components such as web video, which is now mainly powered by Adobe's Flash plug-in, could be handled natively within the browser. (Here's an example of a YouTube video rendered only with HTML5.)

Can Silverlight allow for more powerful web applications than standard web technology? Probably. Does the new Bing Maps look cool with seamless transitions between a map view and on-the-street city view? Yes. But another issue is: Do we really need that?

How often are you doing to need (or want) to zoom around a city with 3D buildings when you really just want to look up an address? It's a neat feature, just as it is within Google Street View or Google Earth, but it's not really all that practical. The majority of location searches I do are on my phone where I simply want to get an address as fast as possible. I actually just had to double check if the iPhone has Street View built-in (it does) because I never, ever use that feature.

Nor do I ever really use it on the desktop. It's useful for some select cases, like maybe if you're buying a house and want to get a look at the neighborhood. But otherwise, it's just a nifty feature to demo ? which Microsoft did extensively today.

Again, I'm not saying it's not cool. It is. But I'm not sure it's worth trading the possibility of a unified web for. In fact, I know it's not. Sadly, with Microsoft, the problem is only going to get worse, and not better. They've made that very clear.

Edited by duffy98
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Acid3 is a less important test than Acid2, but still important. Getting a low score on it is a very bad thing.

The article talks about how Microsoft is pushing its proprietary Silverlight technology to once again gain more control over the web. A very bad thing, indeed.

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Acid3 is a good test for compliance with CSS3, DOM2, and HTML5 standard definitions, but passing (or not passing) the test probably doesn't matter much to the average user. However, if we can get most (all?) current browsers to pass it, we'll have a much more standards-compliant web, and really the only major-browser laggard is IE in this respect (even IE8 only gets 20 / 100). We'll have to see what IE9 does, but if it doesn't come at least as close as FF 3.5 (93/100, the next lowest score out of the other 3 of the "big 4" - Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari all score 100) I think IE will start to really fall off as IE6 users move to something other than IE. We'll still have a good number of company PCs running IE for internal apps and backwards compat with things they developed for IE6 when it was *the* browser around the 2000/XP timeframe, but the rest of the web has already started to move on and IE9 will accelerate that if Microsoft doesn't start taking the draft and recommendation standards (at the very least) seriously. Again, with IE9, I think anything less than 93/100 on Acid3 will be a failure, and considering there are already 3 other major browsers that score 100, I don't know why they wouldn't already be shooting for a 100/100 score.

Silverlight is no more or less evil than using Flash for video, and Silverlight does have advantages for people who want to write web apps that work offline. While I'd rather the web continue to move more towards standards-compliance and rely less on plugins, I don't see plugins as evil (or even as a bad thing) speaking as someone who does this for a living. Silverlight isn't going to take over the web (and Microsoft is no longer in a position to foist it on everyone anymore, anyway) and the folks who use Silverlight will do so because it offers them something that they want or need (mostly this is running a WPF .net app inside a plugin that's browser-agnostic). And given that the heaviest users of this is still Microsoft and usage inside companies on their intranets, I'm not sure it's not making a mountain out of a molehill anyway (I don't see Silverlight replacing flash as the dominant web video plugin anyway, for example). If you want to write a WPF app and put it online, you can use silverlight. If you're designing a web page and just want to embed video, you will probably do everything in HTML and embed using the <video> tag, with a silverlight or flash video object as a fallback for those who use browsers who don't support it.

I don't see this becoming much of anything long term, because IE is slowly dying and Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold on browser marketshare. Had they done this 10 years ago, however, I think the outcome would be vastly different.

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Thanks for the input ... I still have IE 6 on my computers, in case it's needed somewhere ... but I am now using K-Meleon as my main browser, I only get a 31-32 out of 100 on the Acid3 Test site. Does the fact that I am using Win 98SE as my OS helping to give me a lower reading on the test? I am certainly no where near 100% as the other browsers are reporting. ... I also use Proxomitron and I did the test with it active and then with it "by-passed", pretty much the same figures either way. thanks ...

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No, the test simply runs certain DOM, HTML, and script against the browser's rendering engine to see how much of the standards it supports. The OS really won't matter, and if you want to use a browser that is more standards-compliant with newer standards like DOM2, CSS3, and HTML5, you'll probably have to use Opera 10 (it's the only browser on the list of apps that work in Win9x that passes the test) or Firefox 2.0 (52/100). K-Meleon uses the Gecko engine, and it's still on the 1.8 trunk (the latest version of K-Meleon, 1.5.3, uses Gecko 1.8.21 as the rendering engine and scores 52/100). When K-Meleon ships a newer version based on the Gecko 1.9 engine, they'll pick up the better rendering engine and the Acid3 scores will go up (Gecko is the engine that Firefox uses, and FF 3.5 uses Gecko 1.9.1.x and scores 93/100 on Acid3).

Hopefully I didn't just dump too much info on you in a response, but if so check out the wikipedia pages on K-Meleon and the Gecko layout engine for more info in easier-to-digest format :).

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Thanks cluberti ... no, not too much information at all, thanks for taking the time to explain things. The browser information is a little more clear to me now, maybe others also. I am currently using K-Meleon 1.5.3 and I did get up to a 37/100 reading just now. It was 32/100 earlier today. I am not overly concerned with the low figures, the KM browser does everything I need a browser to do. I'm satisfied with it at this time. It was just an article that I came across this morning and I didn't completely understand some of it. It was all new stuff to me.

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Understood. Honestly, most sites out there don't really use anything more than the Acid2 test would test for, but that's partially because there are enough browser users out there that would have trouble with a site if it did ;), hence the catch-22. Once sites do start moving en-masse to more HTML5, DOM2 and DOM3, and CSS3 features will you run into a problem (and I don't see that being a reality really until IE9 becomes the dominant IE version, and/or one of the other browsers gets more than 60% of the browser marketshare, neither of which is likely to happen in the next year or two at the very least).

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Guest wsxedcrfv

Running the acid3 test on my 98se system with FF 2.0.0.20 gives a result of 53/100. The final image doesn't look anything like the reference image. I have a set of stacked gray rectangles instead of a progression of multi-colored boxes from left to right. I also have what appears to be a crude picture of a cat's face that does not appear in the reference image.

On IE6 I get a score of 4 or 5 /100.

The acid2 test on FF gives an almost completely-correct rendered face (the eyes are missing and the mouth is in the wrong place).

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Correct on both counts - as it stands, the only really current standards-compliant browser left for Win9x users is Opera (it scores 100 on Acid3 and renders Acid2 properly, for instance). I believe v10.1 is the latest version you can use on Win9x, although I may be wrong on the minor version number that's compatible.

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I would argue that while DOM2 support is important, CSS3 and HTML5 are less so, as they're still in draft, and not recommendations yet.

These tests only test for specific things, though. Web browsers should focus more on completely supporting existing web standards (which is mostly what Gecko does, which is why they're not in a hurry to pass Acid tests). There's no web browser out there currently that has 100% support for HTML 4.01, CSS1 and CSS2.

Edited by BenoitRen
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I believe v10.1 is the latest version you can use on Win9x, although I may be wrong on the minor version number that's compatible.

It appears that Opera 10.10 works on 98SE and NT4 which is the current version, didn't try the 10.20 build though.

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Hmm, for references sakes (and likely moot) - Firefox 3.7a1 hasn't come far yet from 3.5 as far as passing the Acid 3 tests it would seem. Like the slightly older versions, it is still pushing 96/100 (fails the linktest) in Acid3 under Win98 (although VIA KernelEx).

Edited by Chozo4
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i have been testing some browsers for Immolator project. IE6 failed, also just for curiosity i tested IE7 and 8 on newer windows. they did not pass either. After some experience with other browsers i tested Opera which passed the test and also is able to run on Win98SE.

Also a reason why i started to use Opera. High compatibility with OS, and following the web standards.

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