So we now have 2 browsers (of major 4) that can actually fully pass Acid 2 test: IE8 beta 2 and Opera 9.5x. Safari 3.1.x and Firefox 3.0.x both fail ("nose" is still off by a few pixels compared to the reference rendering). Funny.

Forget Acid 2. How about Acid 3? If the browser is not Acid 2 compliant, the page may not look quite right. Big deal. If it is not Acid 3 compliant, the page may not *work*. Big difference. You know... click on a button or a link and nothing happens? The good news on the Acid 2 front, though, looks like the fact that the latest versions of the two most used browsers either pass it or come so close to passing that the difference hardly matters. The nose is, after all, only 1 vertical pixel off. Perhaps someone could post an IE8 beta 2 Acid 3 result? The compliance of beta 1 was horrid. I think it got 8 out of 100 or something.

How does that make FF or Safaric pass Acid2? It does not. By the way, not many developers/designers really care about SVG today. In the future, we may, but today - not really.

On what planet is this?

"On what planet is this?

Good, means it passed the only test that matters: the real world test.

"Good, means it passed the only test that matters: the real world test.

The planet where people with a life couldn't give a single frak about Acidtwothreetestsbogusnonsensehocuspocus.

Does it render teh google maps? Facebook? Redtube.com?

Good, means it passed the only test that matters: the real world test.

In order to talk about Acid 3, don't you think it would be good to first pass Acid 2?

Oh, I see. FF and Safari still can't fully pass Acid 2, so it is not important now. Yeah, right..

This is a good moment to talk about performance. We think about two kinds of performance: real world and lab. In a lab, we measure performance in milliseconds. That’s important work, and we did a lot of it since Beta 1. You’ll find IE8 is a lot faster than IE7 on many sites. We can go through and detail, for example, exactly which Gmail operations are faster in IE8 than other browsers and vice versa.

But the creator of the Acid2 test himself has said that these browsers pass, because both versions are valid.

So we now have 2 browsers (of major 4) that can actually fully pass Acid 2 test: IE8 beta 2 and Opera 9.5x.

Web designers care a *lot* about "just one pixel". It's 'little' bugs like that which drive even half-assed web developers like me crazy. What if "sometimes" when you ran a command it did almost what you asked, but not quite. Do you accept "occasionally off by one" from a calculator? I wouldn't. It's critically important--especially on the vertical, where fixing it is harder--that things be sized precisely the way the code says it will and precisely the same way between browsers.

"Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode."

I generally don't care for internet explorer, but I really think microsoft is cooking up a winner here. I especially like the grouping of related tabs by color.