Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars 203
Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."
IE has 100% compatability... (Score:5, Funny)
...with MS HTML# 5.0
Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's obvious false advertising isn't it?
Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:5, Insightful)
The advertisement doesn't claim anything about compliance with anything. It claims that IE9 passes 100% of the tests labelled "HTML5" that Microsoft has constructed.
It doesn't claim that those tests either represent the whole of the HTML5 spec or any draft thereof, or even that they test behavior required by the spec or any draft thereof, or even -- except by implication -- that passing them indicates behavior that is acceptable under some draft of the HTML5 spec.
Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:4, Funny)
It doesn't claim that those tests either represent the whole of the HTML5 spec or any draft thereof, or even that they test behavior required by the spec or any draft thereof, or even -- except by implication -- that passing them indicates behavior that is acceptable under some draft of the HTML5 spec.
In Australia (where I am from) an advertisement needs to either have a disclaimer (normally small text at the bottom) if there is vagueness about what it is saying, or what the advertisement says needs to be taken at face value - meaning "what it implies".
Surely the US would have that too?
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Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:4, Informative)
Bad software.
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Marketing department has issued a correction to your statement.
"Bad ass software."
Sign me up!
Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:5, Funny)
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No, the US instead has a strong Constitutional guarantee of free speech which sharply limits government prior restraint of speech, even for commercial speech; disclaimers are rarely required except for products in certain
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The page clearly gives the impression that IE is more compliant than other browsers in general. There are multiple articles and comments all over the web that clearly show that this is the impression most people get when they see the page. Microsoft, however, chose not to fix their page, so it is still as misleading as it used to be.
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The suit would have to be brought against them by a competetitor, since customers can't sue suppliers for false advertising. Or somone from somewhere other than the US would have to sue. I wish we had something like Britain's ASA.
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Yeah, so now Mozilla can pick all the tests that they are successful in and put up a web page stating they are 100% in compliance (with said list of tests) while IE9 is not.
You think Microsoft would let that fly? Look at what AT&T and Verizon have been going on about the past few months. 3G coverage vs. Cellular voice coverage and all that.
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HTML 5 won't be a standard until 2020. Or it looks like they've removed that wildly pessimistic estimate now: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML5_be_finished.3F [whatwg.org].
Read your own link, please, in full. The editor estimates that HTML5 will not reach Recommendation status at the W3C until 2022 or later. This is not "being a standard". HTML5 is a draft standard right now de jure, and much of it is a de facto standard as well. Browsers are already implementing it and it can already be used, regardless of its progress along the formal W3C recommendation track. The latter is a formality and can be safely ignored if you're not a bureaucrat.
Re:IE has 100% compatability... (Score:5, Funny)
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if stacked up against the other Internet Explorers it would not win.
Why not?
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I seem to recall, in the days before Firefox, that Internet Explorer 4 (or was it 5? It's been a while) was actually one of the least bad browsers in common usage. If we're comparing browser to browser in an "adjusted for spec inflation" sense, IE9 actually would probably come in somewhere in the middle of the pack.
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I seem to recall, in the days before Firefox, that Internet Explorer 4 (or was it 5? It's been a while) was actually one of the least bad browsers in common usage.
You mean the days of Netscape 4? Yeah, that was awful. It's not hard to be a better browser than Netscape 4. IE wasn't exactly a good browser, but it was miles ahead of Netscape. It's the days when standards were used as toilet paper.
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Build Your Own Test (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Build Your Own Test (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. However, Microsoft has a poor record of interoperability which only improved recently. So it needs to regain trust. The way to regain trust is to actually improve interoperability and standard conformance, no mere marketing and public affairs campaign. Real credibility stems from real achievements. I am sure Microsoft is able to become an interoperability leader.
Re:Build Your Own Test (Score:5, Funny)
I am sure Microsoft is able to become an inoperability leader.
Fixed that for ya!.
Yeah it's old, but it's good.
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what have they exactly improved with interop? I've never seen them any different than normal, aka zero interop unless mandated by courts.
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well yeah, but considering how lawsuit-happy we increasingly are, then hey...it's not why they did it, but that they did it...right?
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har har. making 1% of your stuff interop versus the 99% incompatible isn't really a step forward. That's like open sourcing your shoelace while all the rest of the clothing is still proprietary.
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what have they exactly improved with interop? I've never seen them any different than normal, aka zero interop unless mandated by courts.
IE8 is as fully CSS2.1-compliant as any browser. You no longer need to write separate stylesheets for IE8 in practice, you just have to make sure not to use CSS3 features (it only implements a couple). IE9 improves standards compliance in a host of ways. None of this is court-mandated, it's probably just Microsoft realizing that they'd like web developers not to loathe them with the fury of a thousand blazing suns.
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Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is a piece of crap. What matters to me is speed and reliability, specifically that pages are rendered fast, and that they appear as intended by the web developer.
As it stands, the competition offers better products. Should IE9 turn out to be faster than Chrome, I'd gladly start using it again. However, I highly doubt it will be that way.
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Here's a thought... USE ANOTHER BROWSER.
I do, and I strongly recommend that everyone else do too. But as a web developer, I'm enthusiastic about better IE standards support anyway, because I know that many of my users use IE regardless of what I do. If it's more standards-compliant, my job is that much easier.
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First off if this is a technical discussion, we should probably be talking about layout engines -- not browsers.
Meh. If I code a website, I want to know which browsers can show it correctly and which can't. I don't care about whatever layout engines the browsers use, that's pretty irrelevant for me. (Okay: I don't really care even about the browsers, I care about users. Certain demographics tend to use certain browsers, etc... But as most of the statistics about the subject are about browser shares, not layout engine shares, I see no reason to switch to talking about the layout engines there.) If I want to choose a n
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That is disgraceful.
Code to standards. Let the poor browsers fail.
Microsoft created this situation, you should expose their failings, not paper over them.
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Code to standards. Let the poor browsers fail.
So you get fired? Great advice.
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You do realize that significant numbers of browsers share the same layout engines ? So if your site works in the layout engine - it will work with *all* the browsers that support it (give or take a tiny bit).
For example Google-chrome and Safari both use a variant of the KHTML engine (known as WebKIT - KTHML itself is used by Konqueror and several related KDE projectS), as does any embedded browser using default QT4 features. There are literally dozens of browsers that use the gecko engine from firefox. In
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You can assume they will have a high likelyhood of working fine but just because two browsers use gecko or webkit doesn't mean the version of browsers you have promised to support are using the same version of it. And afaict at least with webkit based browsers some of them have done things like swapping out the JS engine which has the potential to break stuff.
The IE engine is an unusual case as afaict the version of it used depends on the version of IE installed rather than the version of the "browser" the
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You can come up with whatever perventage you want from those charts as some things (Video) might be deal breakers compared to others (MathML).
i avoid high schools to keep my perventage low.
Re:Build Your Own Test (Score:4, Funny)
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Do we have any *real* test? (Score:2)
And by "real" I mean tests that includes all HTML5 specifications...
Re:Do we have any *real* test? (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK, can we have a test that includes all specifications of the HTML5 Working Draft?
Yes, we will. HTML5 will have an official test suite. It will take a very long time to put it together, though, since the spec is hundreds of pages long, and writing tests isn't trivial. You have to carefully read the spec and fully understand it, for one, which requires a lot of time and skill. Microsoft is helping by contributing tests for features they implement.
Re:Do we have any *real* test? (Score:5, Insightful)
While you are sitting back and waiting for someone else to write these comprehensive test suites the only entity really taking the W3C Test Suite projects seriously at all is Microsoft. They've submitted thousands of test cases for CSS2.1 and have been working to submit hundreds of tests for CSS3.0 and HTML5. These are the very tests that are being disparaged here. It can be claimed that Microsoft is stacking these tests intentionally, except that these tests are publically available for comment and scrutiny. The Test Suite projects are open for submissions by others as well so Google and Mozilla and anyone else is free to submit tests of behaviors that IE9 fails and that their browser passes. The more comprehensive these test case projects are the more everyone benefits by having a real target to implement.
ACID is not an authority. They cherry pick a relative handful of problematic yet pointless tests and construct something cute. ACID3 tests about a hundred different things from a mix of technologies. The W3C Test Suite for CSS2.1 currently has nearly 8,000 tests. Which do you think is more comprehensive?
Re:Do we have any *real* test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the problem with HTML. The W3C doesn't create an acceptance test, so there's really no objective way to measure how compliant a particular browser truly is. People love to use the ACID tests, but ACID tests only a small portion of the relevant standards. And the portions tested aren't even the major, important parts; ACID tests for very obscure, esoteric parts of the standards.
On one hand, you can look at the ACID tests and say 'well, at least it's an indication of interest in conforming to the standard.' But is that true either? ACID tests have become another marketing point: 'my browser got to 100% compliance before your browser.' Aiming for 100% on the ACID tests doesn't necessarily indicate a desire to be highly compliant, it indicates a desire to score 100% on the ACID tests.
You could perhaps consider the instantaneous behavior of the tests: how compliant various browsers are upon release of the new test. There's a certain logic to that; developers which are truly interested in compliance, and not just marketing, will do well in a previously unseen test. But ACID tests aren't developed in isolation either. They're politically justified, an effort to encourage compliance, and as such they test for specific behaviors which major browsers were getting wrong (i.e., a browser could be 99.9% compliant, and ACID would target the 0.1% they get wrong).
So to answer your question: No. There's no comprehensive compliance/acceptance test for any of W3C's standards, so don't expect one either. The only evidence of compliance is anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Microsoft's test results are completely unsurprising and generally meaningless for anybody familiar with normal development practices, and W3C standards, but it's a nice indication that they're aiming for at least some level of standards-compliance in IE9.
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On hindsight,
1) Why can't the tests be created with a random generator? Create webpage, internal logic calculates image which should be generated, test image generated with screenshot (or better, pull the image from the drawing cache).
2) Along with Javascript/CSS, shouldn't it be possible to test with a range of values anyway? Granted a full test may take a significant amount of time (since you have to test multiple values at the same time), but for a full test, I don't think this would be an issue. An adde
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"internal logic", huh? Do you realize that means a complete implementation of all the relevant standards with no faults. If we could do that, maybe we should put it in a browser...
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Well, that's the problem with HTML. The W3C doesn't create an acceptance test, so there's really no objective way to measure how compliant a particular browser truly is.
An official test suite will be developed for HTML5. It's a huge amount of work, though. Microsoft is contributing tests as they add features to IE9, which is great. Of course they pass all the tests; they're probably designing the tests as part of their implementation, as part of an automated test suite for IE9. But it's great that they're helping out by contributing their internal tests to the public for use in a comprehensive cross-browser test suite.
The only obnoxious thing here is that they're pos
New MS, Same as the old... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hell, why do that. Just put out a press release saying you won and the other side is lying.
Re:New MS, Same as the old... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, Microsoft is Captain Kirk now?
Bald.. check.
Fat.. check.
Arrogant.. check.
Seems so..
Re:New MS, Same as the old... (Score:5, Funny)
So Kirk's jilted speech - that's just him swapping out to disk?
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So Kirk's jilted speech - that's just him swapping out to disk?
Well that or a dodgy sound card driver.
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Hold up there buddy....
It seems as if you were comparing a fat, nasty, greasy, fat, stank, bloated, cheesy-backed, twelve-sandwich-eating bastard to Captain Kirk right now.
Granted.... Captain Kirk may have put on a few pounds, got himself a damned fined toupee, and be a little bit arrogant.. but the man was Captain James T. Kirk. He was hitting intergalatic strange out in the alpha quadrant when you was just an itch in your daddy's pants. I would say a little respect is in order.
I am also pretty sure Capt
Here's how to solve the impasse (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, let knowledgeable slashdotters point us novices to a set of a "standard" HTML5 test site to which we can run and establish the fact.
Ohh wait, I forgot that there is yet to be any agreement on the HTML5 standard itself! This is why I think Apple is just bluffing with their campaign against Flash. It also demonstrates the weaknesses we all have to work around.
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There is plenty of agreement in the html5 draft, lots of it is not controversial.
There certainly is not complete agreement.
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The other camp: mostly the open source community push for Ogg containers (Theora/Vorbis), despite h.264 is a superior codec Micr
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There isn't full agreement but most of it is pretty complete. The only non nitpicking issue that people cant agree on is video/audio. Microsoft and Apple want push h.264 into their browsers and push h.264 as a de-facto standard so they advocate against defining a codec in HTML5 (an open standard). Of course they dont support anything else in IE and Safari(for HTML5 video tags)
If you think audio and video codecs are the only part of the spec that's controversial, you clearly don't follow the HTMLWG mailing list. There are 29 open issues [w3.org], and many of them have been hotly debated. So have lots of other issues that weren't formally raised to the tracker.
The video codec issue actually was resolved long ago – the spec just doesn't say what codecs are required, and no one is really objecting to that. Mozilla, Opera, and Google support open codecs, but none has suggested that
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Note that site tests things that aren't actally required by the current drafts of the spec. e.g. support for particular audio/video codecs.
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Clearly... (Score:2, Insightful)
Clearly, the independent, third-party tests are flawed. Microsoft would never create a biased benchmarking test to promote their own product.
Seriously though? The only people that understand what HTML5 is and what these results actually mean are going to understand that it is complete nonsense.
No shipping IE results (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA: "The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows."
So...IE8 isn't a "major shipping browser" that runs on Windows?
If IE8 scores so terribly that Microsoft is embarrassed to post its scores, that's fine, but it would be less dishonest and more informative then to include recent betas of their competitors' browsers in addition to the latest shipping version.
Microsoft fakes test results to favor themselves! (Score:2, Funny)
In other news, something surprising happened.
Coming up next: are angry hobos stalking your Facebook account? What you don't know might eat you. Film at 11.
Sex analogy (Score:3, Funny)
That's like saying slashdotters are 100% successful sexually.
If the tests that include the opposite sex are excluded.
Re:Sex analogy BLAH WHATEVER (Score:2)
Fuck that. Car analogy.
It's like testing several cars with similar performance on a very long, winding racetrack covered with obstacles and comparing their lap times to that of another car that drives around a very short and straight loop.
It's easy to say who gets first place when you get to choose the conditions of winning. Doesn't matter, though, the point here isn't to make Internet Explorer more popular, it's to make Microsoft look like they're competing fairly and remaining relevant.
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His Analogy would hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
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His Analogy would hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
Game, set and match.
Re:Sex analogy BLAH WHATEVER (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Bad Analogy Guy is kind of like a car. And the radio only gets two stations on AM, but there's an eight track with a copy of "Journey's Greatest Hits" stuck in it. If you look at it that way then this discussion is something like an eight hour drive from Tulsa, OK to one of the Portlands. I can't remember which one, but it's eight hours away by car. Now the car has wood grain paneling on the right side and some kind spray-on granite countertop on the left, so the driver can lean out of the window and chop tomatoes as long as the passenger leans over to take the wheel.
The rest of us are the two pedigreed schnoodles sitting in the back seat, trying to eat bacon and egg sandwiches.
Does that answer your question?
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It's all so clear now... my days of nihilism are finally over...
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...
The rest of us are the two pedigreed schnoodles sitting in the back seat, trying to eat bacon and egg sandwiches.
Does that answer your question?
You forgot the freaky right-wing rant!
Aha, success! (Score:4, Funny)
We have a winner! :D
Cheers,
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Were you running those tests with System.Web.Hand 3.5.0.0 enabled?
Using hand-crafted code.
It's also worth mentioning... (Score:5, Informative)
...that they benchmarked IE trunk against OLD versions of other browsers. They didn't even use Chrome 5.0!
In some places it's a significant difference. [withinwindows.com]
I also did some benchmarks of my own on non-Microsoft controlled sites. See the first comment on that page for results. Suffice it to say IE9 has improved since IE8 but still has a ways to go.
Re:It's also worth mentioning... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines,
Uh, what? Webkit [wikipedia.org], the basis for Chrome, has been around since 1998 (then KHTML). As long ago as KDE 2, Konqueror (using KHTML) was a usable browsing alternative (2001?) and was better than Firefox for some time.
Apple took KHTML some time ago, forked it for Safari, and a lot of those forked changes got merged back into the engine. Google has since forked the project again, but the engine changes are still evolving and improving.
Honestly, Webkit is significantly more mature than the other browser engines now:
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``Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines, so we expect it to mature rapidly, but hardly can expect it to match it's cousin Safari in most areas, thous we expect it would in a short time.''
I think that depends on how you look at it. Chrome's rendering engine is based on an older version of the rendering engine from Safari, which is in turn based on KHTML from Konqueror, which was forked from khtmlw in 1998, making it about as old as the Gecko engine used by Mozilla. While C
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I would hardly call Chrome immature. It has had since its inception features that other browsers are just dying to imitate now. Per process tabs, plug-in sandboxing, site specific browsing, silent updates... And it came out of left field! It's a fast browser popular among the technically literate. And it has its own marketing campaign.
Not immature.
HTML5TEST (Score:3, Informative)
http://html5test.com/ [html5test.com]
things like this will have to do until we see something like ACID support HTML5.
My favorite part of the "Canvas Campaign"... (Score:5, Funny)
Discussion of test results
Based on the tests that we have performed, it is very clear that there is a very big difference between the best and worst browsers. Therefore we can only conclude that the results are valid and true.
Now if that isn't a rigorous application of the scientific method I don't know what is!
Huff, Huff and gufaw! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Microsoft is 100% Microsoft compatible (restrictions and exclusions apply).
Many restrictions and exclusions, such as using the same version.
The Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a difference that everyone should note. When the later Acid tests were formulated they were written by Webkit and Gecko developers and were specifically biased against those engines. If one of the two did not fail, it didn't go in. That way it motivates them to improve. When MS writes a test suite it's biased in favor of their engine, so they can claim to be "ahead" and have no motivation to improve. It's an excellent example of who values technical excellence and who values marketing.
Re:The Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me more like all parties are doing test driven development.
I think the difference here is that the Acid tests were published before anybody went and got 100% of them. But I'd bet that Microsoft wrote these tests back when IE9 didn't pass them, then made IE9 pass them, THEN released the tests.
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I think the difference here is that the Acid tests were published before anybody went and got 100% of them. But I'd bet that Microsoft wrote these tests back when IE9 didn't pass them, then made IE9 pass them, THEN released the tests.
Maybe, but there's no way to know that and there's no pressure on them to fix what's still broken because they haven't released a list of what's broken and what it is their goal to fix. So whether MS wrote tests they knew they'd pass or wrote tests then fixed them before publishing them, either way they're not in the same boat and not focused on technical excellence so much as marketing.
Re:The Difference (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, what do you expect? Microsoft has always been a marketing company first and foremost.
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I took the time to read the source of the tests. (Score:5, Informative)
The reason why most tests failed with browsers other than IE:
1st) Since HTML5 is still in a very early state, many browsers (AKA Webkit, Gecko, Presto) used prefixes for most tags and CSS properties. Example: round borders is -moz-border-radius in gecko, and -webkit-border-radius in Chrome. Some latest versions have taken some out of beta and also read border-radius, but most still don't. IE obviously uses border-radius, and that's why other's don't work. ... except they are not, because they use HTML5 styles and tags, and they do not validate. Validator says: The document located at was tentatively checked as XHTML 1.0 Strict. This means that with the use of some fallback or override mechanism, we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML, HTML5 and/or XML Parser(s). In other words, the document would validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict if you changed the markup to match the changes we have performed automatically, but it will not be valid until you make these changes.
2nd) The JS is tricky at best. Go and check it out. Lots of lines of code to perform a simple task, and those lines are carefully selected to fail in other browsers. I downloaded the tests, and they work on ALL browsers (I tested Chrome, Firefox and Opera, all on GNU/Linux, all on their latest version). That JS was crafted to fail on all browsers and work only on IE
3rd) I took the time to run the source of many of their scripts through the W3C validator. Most scripts have several warnings, some errors, etc. They DO NOT VALIDATE.
4th) The tests aren't really HTML5. Only the HTML5 tests are actual HTML5, the others are XHTML 1.0 strict
It's microsoft ... never forget about that. This is business as usual.
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Sorry to reply to myself, but I forgot a few things:
1st: The actual ietestcenter fails validation with 12 errors and 6 warnings: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0 [w3.org]
Including some serious ones, like no Character encoding specified.
None of the tests specify a character encoding either.
Does it really matter? (Score:2)
Microsoft needs to do one thing only (Score:4, Interesting)
MS needs to fuully separate the render engine fron the browser in a way so that they can be updated individually. There are features in the browser which users may like or dislike, may require or not. Let the browser handle things like plugins just provide hooks for compositing in the render engine. Let the browser handle security, etc. Let the render "render".
What the fuck? (Score:2)
Who the hell wrote these stupid tests? Whoever it is was a fucking moron.
I went down the list and picked the first one that Firefox supposedly failed on... “Call select() on a text field.” Firefox fails this test? What the fuck? I’ve used select() on text fields many a time and Firefox supports it just fine. Something’s fishy. So.......... I hit up the test page [microsoft.com] and read the source code.
If there’s a javascript error, the test obviously fails. A bunch of the attributes of window
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The Insert Node Into Selection [microsoft.com] test is equally retarded.
They create a new <div> element and insert it at the end of the selection in an existing <div>. In other words, they generate this:
...then they check to see if the value returned by selection.toString() is equal to “some textnew text”.
Morons. It shows up as this:
...and that’s what toString() gives you, too.
IE9 installed base: zero (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft should shut up and ship.
Re:test results are largely irrelevant anyway (Score:5, Informative)
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Forced? No, they're not forced.
But they have, on occasion, put themselves into the "this will be upgraded unless you remove it" stack. I've seen a half dozen places bitten by IE upgrades (7 and 8) they did not manually select themselves.
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Yes, there is a point after each IE release where Microsoft pushes the newest version through Automatic Updates (I think it's even pushed as a critical update, but I can't remember for sure). There is a toolkit [microsoft.com] and various registry settings to stop the automatic delivery of IE through Automatic Updates, which is supposed to be applied by IT before that time.
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Corporates can still buy XP till SP1 comes out for Windows 7 and I think that EOL for XP is 2014 or somewhere thereabouts.
That said, no one should be using XP. Move to Linux, move to Mac, or upgrade. XP is a steaming pile after all these years and the idiots with the rose coloured glasses obsessing about how great it is and how it works on the computer they bought in the 1990's can go take a running leap.
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Like IE8, IE7 and IE6 before them, windows users will be forced to upgrade to 9 sooner or later anyway.
Yeah, what the hell? Most Windows users I deal with who aren't running Firefox, are running IE6 on XP.
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Yes, that’s the function where they deliberately wrote incorrect test conditions that reflect the incorrect way that IE9 is going to do it but fail on everything that does it correctly.