Submitted by Opera is now fully Acid2 compliant. Its latest preview build fixes the last missing feature that was preventing the test page from rendering correctly. Other improvements in this release: fixed crasher on Flash; added experimental support for opening Web archives; improved display of content blocker toolbar; added keyboard shortcuts Cmd+[ and Cmd+] for back/forward on Mac; and much more.
Of all the resources behind the mozilla foundation, what is stopping these browsers from being acid2 compliant?
probably the irrelevance of acid2 “test”
It’s not irrelevant in the Marketing sense – just in the technical sense.
Because Mozilla is based on Netscape and Netscape, like Internet Explorer, created its own standards years ago. But this is wrong, you’re right!
I still need to understand why Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, ect cannot strictly follow the w3c standards for HTML, XHTML, JavaScript (ECMAScript), DOM, CSS, ect. THOSE STANDARDS ARE NOT CONFUSING AT ALL AND ARE EASY TO IMPLEMENT.
I understand that Mozilla (ex-Netscape) and Microsoft may be a little behind (well Mozilla is starting to support most of them pretty well), because there were only a few poor standards years ago. But damn, now it’s time to jump on the boat. Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 should both be 100% compliant to most w3c standards. ITS NOTHING HARD TO UNDERSTAND.
If it’s so easy, why don’t you implement the standards yourself, hm?
Both Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 are going to be short of most w3c standards when they are released. They’re just going to be nearer than they are now.
If you watched any of w3c mailing lists, you’d know even the most clear specs can have multiple intepretations, with regular questions being asked about intended behaviour.
Look at IE again, its not as near to Mozilla as you think..
Great Opera….I really like this browser and am using it on my last windows desktop and my other freebsd machines.
The acid2 test is great in practice, but in the business world, totally and utterly irrelevant.
It’s all about “bums on seats”
Sure, accessibility is the big thing and should never be ignored, but lets be honest, web dev these days is advanced enough to work around the bugs to code pages which render in browsers X amount of years old – usually up to 3 or 4 years back.
Opera has such insignificant market share, it’s still pointless bothering to use it in the testing procedure for a commercial website.
I hope that one day soon, it gains enough market share to reach that point – firefox is a wonderful example of the rise of an alternative browser.
Rather than focus wasted talents getting a smiley face to render perfectly, it would be far more ideal to see the Opera team focus on what drives commercial web dev reams – once again, “bums on seats” – say it with gusto !
Opera – and I don’t give a flying monkey out my ass who disagrees – is too much of a rank outsider for web devs to bother with.
I do web development and I always always always test in Opera first, and will make changes to any of my coworkers code if it doesn’t work in Opera
In reality, you’re mostly right, most people don’t care enough. That’s partly a result of their incompetance (not fully understanding how to do their job) and partly because simply of the history of web pages too.
You just go around mucking with other people’s code, willy-nilly? That would irritate me, being a development team leader and senior web developer, if I had a team member that just went around changing peoples’ code without informing them or at least letting them know what code they produced that was borked. Don’t you guys do code reviews? Design reviews?
You made some assumptions there.
We do code reviews, yes. Usually the things are so minor that they require quick tweaks, or just not blocking Opera. I submit the changes for code review, and so long as it still works in IE, everyone is happy.
hmmm, ignoring opera. that’s a great idea. hey, if you really take it to heart you could just go ahead and ignore all mobile browsing devices, set-top boxes, phones completely! but hey, let’s ignore them, because nobody really uses browsers in phones do they? oh, wait — except for the world’s third largest economy, japan. and an increasing percentage of europe, and… hmm.
well, while we’re at it, opera’s got, what, somewhere between 1-3% registered desktop share? (probably more given that it usually registering as IE)
so, if my website is large, like amazon, let’s see how much money i could be pissing away if i don’t give that flying monkey:
amazon annual report for 2004 http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsAnn…
from page 93 of their 2004 annual report, let’s look at Net Sales:
Q4: $2,540,959,000
Q3: $1,462,475,000
Q2: $1,387,341,000
Q1: $1,530,349,000
so… that’s $6.9 billion. let’s piss away 1-3% of that. ooo, nice — you just lost between 69 and 207 million dollars. good one.
hope you’re not developing any commercial websites. your clients will be really happy to know that you’re losing a couple of percent of their business for no good reason.
“so… that’s $6.9 billion. let’s piss away 1-3% of that. ooo, nice — you just lost between 69 and 207 million dollars. good one. “
Assuming all the errors render the site completely and utterly useless – the vast majority will be things such as pixel-perfect alignment and unsupported selectors that let them be ignored.
that’s perfectly true — but of course you wouldn’t know if you had something that worked or not if you “didn’t give a flying monkey” about this segment of your users and never tested; by not knowing or caring, you have put that much turnover at risk, and that is clearly irresponsible and, frankly, dumb…
also, it doesn’t have to render the site useless to lose that money, merely degrade the user experience enough that people are less likely to return, or to go on to purchase at all, vs alternative sites that work seamlessly…
Congrats to Opera! It is a fast and fine browser and might be my favorite one, but:
Firefox has just proved to be much more stable for me With Opera, I’ve experiences strange browser crashes sometimes (running Linux mostly, & not sure about Opera on Windows?). Besides, Firefox integrates nicely with Linux desktop environments like GNOME, and I also love certain Firefox extensions that Opera doesn’t have.
The Acid2 test smiley image that Firefox produces is fine for me… (i.e. already quite close to ideal also & just a bit behind Opera), the test result is only slightly more cubistic than the one that Opera produces… 😛
One thing about Opera crashes…when you restart the browser, it reopens all of the tabs that you had open before.
Browser crashes are annoying…but Opera makes them a little less annoying.
I test in Opera as well before releasing a page to the public.
Opera always seems to be the most finicky of browsers when it comes to how your code is written.
I sometimes wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I think it’s a good thing. It leads to cleaner markup/code which helps to “future-proof” it.
Yeah, you are right – in web development, testing pages in the most CSS standard compliant browser, Opera, makes lots of sense.
If the pages don’t work well in Opera, something is sure wrong with the pages, but not likely with the browser.
Congratulations to the Opera team.
Besides this milestone, the browser is evolving so much in this new version 9, with small and big improvements, but all very useful. I’m looking forward for version 9, it’s very mature both in features as in its interface and performance.
Congrats again!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that Acid2 Test isn’t all about 100% pure standards, but instead includes some non-standard codes to see whether the web browser ignores non-standard codes or not.
So, the more the browser tolerates non-standard codes, the more messy the output of the A2T.
QUOTE *Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that Acid2 Test isn’t all about 100% pure standards, but instead includes some non-standard codes to see whether the web browser ignores non-standard codes or not.* /QUOTE
You are correct about that. Reading the info at http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/guide.html confirms just that. This is what they say:
QUOTE *Acid2 tests features that web designers have been requesting. Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification. After careful consideration, we have selected and are testing the features we consider most important for the future of the web. Although Acid2 was inspired by Microsoft’s announcement of IE7, it is not targeted at a specific browser. We believe Acid2 will highlight problems in all current browsers./QUOTE
In essence, it tests a browsers support for the features that web designers have been requesting in hopes that those requests will soon become a reality.
It’s like “I double-dog dare you, no, I triple-dog dare you” in hopes that they can trick the browser developers to take on the challenge, so the coders get what they want, hehe
sneaky, sneaky 🙂
I believe I read elsewhere that the version of Konqueror in KDE 3.5 also passes the acid2 test, right behind Apple’s Safari. Not surprising, as Safari is based on KHTML, the rendering engine in Konqueror, and the GPL forces Apple to share their patches to the code.
Firefox may not yet pass acid2, but if my experience is anything to go by, it is a lot closer to being standards compliant than any version of Internet Explorer.
-Gnobuddy
Both Konqueror and Safari still have rendering issues (background-position for example) despite passing AcidTest2.
…no one cares about Opera so long as there isn’t a (working) way to block ads in the browser without getting too technical.
–bornagainpenguin (who quit Opera after ver7.xx when it became clear Opera had no intention of allowing adblocking and behold Firefox did it soooo well!)
GOT to love someone who posts something like this without even having a clue or paying the slightest attention. Even to the original news item text. Amazing…
“…no one cares about Opera so long as there isn’t a (working) way to block ads in the browser without getting too technical.
–bornagainpenguin (who quit Opera after ver7.xx when it became clear Opera had no intention of allowing adblocking and behold Firefox did it soooo well!)”
Have a look at the content blocking in Opera 9.