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The Internet Internet Explorer Mozilla

Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test 281

Posted by timothy from the raising-the-bar dept.
naylor83 writes "Four weeks ago, Opera's CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they're no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people's."
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Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test More

Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test

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  • So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @04:49PM (#12205791) Homepage Journal
    Right. So none of the browsers tested can display the test page correctly? And they're the best, most compliant browsers available?

    And they've had how long to get it right?

    In that case, it would seem to me that it is the standard that is broken, if it's really that difficult to render a page with a cascading style sheet.

    • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:5, Informative)

      by commonchaos ( 309500 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @04:53PM (#12205846) Homepage Journal
      Not even Firefox supports all of CSS2.

      Google found an article [spreadfirefox.com] that describes this in more detail

    • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @04:57PM (#12205885)
      I don't think the standard's broken persay, I just believe that programmers haven't yet implemented it completely/correctly. CSS2 is a very difficult standard to implement simply because it encompasses so much not only in code length, but in what it actually does. That being said, CSS2 is really ahead of its time (as is CSS3), but as the competition for the better browser roars up, you can bet your bottom dollar that these standards will be the key issues everyone is looking at.

      I really think it's going to be a tough race verses Firefox and Internet Explorer; Microsoft has more coders out there to throw at Internet Explorer, whereas Firefox already has industry leading stamina and good developmental practices, even if some of them are contraversial (disabling itf domains support, for example). Either way, the browsers will get better, and eventually will be able to render that page without any issue, but it'll just take time.

      • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I don't think the standard's broken persay

        The term is per se. It's Latin.

        CSS 2 isn't ahead of it's time and it isn't particularly difficult to implement. The trouble is that as long as web developers don't use any of it's more esoteric features, bugs and corner cases will continue to crop up in browsers. And as long as the most popular web browser, Internet Explorer, fails to implement half of CSS 2, web developers will refrain from using most of CSS 2 - thus making finding bugs in the more advanc

        • Of course the other problem is companies differ on their interpretation of the CSS2 spec, because in places the spec itself is vague.

          • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            This test also helps with that. In the case that differing renderings are found that are both legitimate readings of the specification, then the wording in the specification can be tightened up. Consider this a test not only of web browsers, but the CSS specifications themselves.
        • per se: thank you for pointing that out. that anglificated expression has been annoying for me for quite a while already, and it pleases me to see that some people do know how to spell it correctly.

          about blaming bugs on IE and whatnot: not very useful. let's just praise the wasp people for providing a thorough test, and let's see if the IE/Gecko/Opera developers can get it right.

          (keeping my fingers crossed)
        • Ah myapologies grammer nazi/troll. I'm quite a bit sick and I like to stay indoors and argue with /.ers when I'm under the weather.

          CSS2 is ahead of its time. It uses the Document Object Model to draw, color, and arrange items in a way agnostic to implementation, and agnostic to content. Sure, we already have programs capable of drawing, coloring and arranging items in a document; each of them being tied inextricably to their creation-engine (Microsoft Word and Word documents, for example). Not only that,

          • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by snorklewacker ( 836663 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @06:22PM (#12206573)
            > Face it. We dropped the ball

            These people at the W3C dropped an incomplete spec out of their ivory tower with incoherent documentation, no functioning reference implementation, and no test suite, and we dropped the ball?

          • Re:So nothing can display it correctly? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by StrongAxe ( 713301 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @06:49PM (#12206853)
            As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer; they should be encouraged to do so, so that Internet Explorer would continue to evolve.

            And just who could afford to do this? If you run a commercial web site, do you want most of your customers to see a page that looks like crap, with a footnote at the bottom saying "We know your page looks like crap, but it's Microsoft's fault, and we hope they will have it fixed within the next two years"?

            What will happen is that your customers will go away until it gets fixed. Who loses? Microsoft? or you? Will Microsoft lose any sleep over the fact that you are losing customers? Very unlikely.
            • I've got some of the non-IE-supported stuff going on like PNG files with alpha-channels, etc. Right now the pages I'm developing look like crud in IE as colours are missing from transparent windows, etc...

              Once all the pages are together though, I'll throw in a .CSS file that loads for the IE users. They won't look as spiffy as firefox/etc but the pages will at least not be hard on the eyes in IE.
          • it's the Web Developers for not using the
            standards

            This is a wonderfully inane/idealistic comment.

            What, exactly, are the developers going to do when they need to check that they code they have created displays correctly?

            Or, perhaps, they should include yet another browser detection code path for a browser that doesn't exist to which they can emit a "correct" page?

          • > I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive

            On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a [latex-project.org] variety [sourceforge.net] of [scribus.org.uk] software [openoffice.org] packages [accesspdf.com]. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)

            > I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on

            Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).

            > it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features

            It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests [hixie.ch] out there, but still...

            > As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer

            Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).

            > If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards

            What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !

            [*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*

            • There are myriad free tools to read PDF. There are myriad free tools to write to PDF (or especially "print to PDF")

              There is a serious, design driven lack of any way to edit PDFs. As in, I create a PDF in an application foo, send it to my friend who also has foo, they make changes and send it back. Word has been doing this for more than a decade, and PDF, as far as I can tell, doesn't do this ever. If one of those pieces of software does this, please point it out.

              If you want a more detailed text case,

              • There is a serious, design driven lack of any way to edit PDFs. As in, I create a PDF in an application foo, send it to my friend who also has foo, they make changes and send it back.

                Just out of curiosity, why are you exchanging PDF files (which are designed to be rendered) instead of $APPLICATION files (which are designed to be edited)?

                I always assumed that converting to PDF was the final step, not a repeated intermediate one.

                The next-best option available is to ... send back and forth the original file

    • ..well, actually, that begs the question: was the page intentionally done so that no current browser displays it correctly?

    • In that case, it would seem to me that it is the standard that is broken, if it's really that difficult...

      This is an extremely common standards pitfall. I used to work with one standard, where the documentation for one file format was thousands of pages. No suprise, every vendor implemented a different part of it to varying degrees of correctness. It sucked to no end.

      Web standards over the last several years have taken a course of not so much big standards but huge numbers of standards. I'd bet one H
    • The page renders fine in my Firefox - (Debian package 1.0+dfsg.1-2).

      • Yeah, it seems to render fine in mine too (assuming it's meant to be a single smiling face with the text "Hello World" floating above). Well, at least there's nothing obviously askew (as there is in the broken Opera and Firefox 1.0 screenshots).

        I'm running Firefox built from CVS of a couple of days ago (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050410 Firefox/1.0+).

    • IMHO this is how it should happen. Standards should be set high to give the browser makers something to aim for.

      Back in the early days of anti-virus software the ICSA labs (I think it was the NCSA labs at that point) started certifying AV products. Their test was pretty simple, it required identification of %100 of the common viruses in the wild that they threw at it. No AV product passed it when the test first came out. By setting the bar high it drove competation in the marketplace and spurred on al

  • What I'm looking for (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scumdamn ( 82357 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @04:50PM (#12205801)
    is an analysis of what failed with each browser (especially Firefox.) None of the links told us why the browser failed to render the smiley face or what the WSP did to obfuscate the code. Any takers?

  • A big fat DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11, 2005 @04:56PM (#12205877)

    It was known before the test was published that no browser would get it right. That's the whole point!

    The reason for having this is to expose bugs in current implementations. Internet Explorer is the obvious retard, implementing about 50% of CSS 2.1, but that doesn't mean that the other browsers can just slack off at 95%. That's not what the W3C is about, it's not what WASP is about, and it's not what this acid test is about.

  • Safari... (Score:2, Informative)

    by etedronai ( 35656 ) *
    also fails

  • how do the others stack up ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @05:14PM (#12206041) Homepage Journal
    like

    safari on tiger anyone ?
    please post a screenshot of that I would really be intrested

    stats on web browsers market share
    w3 numbers [w3schools.com]

  • The Standard (Score:3, Insightful)

    by happymedium ( 861907 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @05:18PM (#12206072)
    Right now I am looking at a handy CSS reference chart saying which browser supports what, and the fact is, one third to half of the standard is entirely un-implemented by Mozilla, Opera and IE.

    If a CSS standard falls on browser designers to implement, and no one implements it, was it really "the standard?"

    • Re:The Standard (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      one third to half of the standard is entirely un-implemented by Mozilla, Opera and IE.

      That depends on what you mean by "and". Internet Explorer doesn't support half of CSS 2, so obviously if you are looking for features implemented by Mozilla AND Opera AND Internet Explorer, then Internet Explorer is going to drag the others down.

      If, on the other hand, you are claiming that Mozilla doesn't implement half of CSS 2, Opera doesn't implement half of CSS 2, and Internet Explorer doesn't implement half of

    • Good point. It takes real leadership to spearhead a standards committee into what should be the "better" future while not trailing too far beyond what implementations can handle.

      However we are in a different situation than simply a poor standards committee and/or poor implementations (I don't care to judge either in this post). Microsoft has an entrenched, stubborn base of non-compliant code run by the majority of Internet users. As such, we have one implementation which carries much more weight than

  • What browser did they use? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Macrobat ( 318224 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @05:40PM (#12206239)
    Just out of curiosity...what browser did they use to get the successful reference rendering? I'm presuming there's one that successfully renders, otherwise, how do they know their test code is valid? I've clicked around but don't know what they used to generate that png.

  • Valid CSS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @05:44PM (#12206293) Journal
    I'm confused, is this supposed to be valid CSS2? The W3C CSS validator finds 8 errors in the page.

    -molo

    CSS validator results [w3.org]

    * Line: 46
    Parse Error - second two]
    * Line: 91 Context : .parser-container div
    Invalid number : color orange is not a color value : orange
    * Line: 97 Context : .parser
    Property error doesn't exist : }
    * Line: 100 Context : .parser
    Property m rgin doesn't exist : 2em
    * Line: 100
    Parse error - Unrecognized : };
    * Line: 102 Context : .parser
    Invalid number : width only 0 can be a length. You must put an unit after your number : 200
    * Line: 103 Context : .parser
    Parse Error - ! error;
    * Line: 103 Context : .parser
    Parse error - Unrecognized : }

  • The Real Lessons (Score:4, Insightful)

    by welshbyte ( 839992 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @05:48PM (#12206340) Homepage

    The real lessons to be learnt from this seem to be getting lost here. If we put aside the MS vs Moz, FUD vs non-FUD and not-as-broken vs either broken or not debates we can see that web designers should have something to look forward to in the (near?) future.

    Finally, here is something that could actually give the browser developers something to aim for and help to pull together the standardisation of modern CSS rendering. From how that smiley face is supposed to look I'm already quite excited about what we'll be able to do once all of the browsers are up to scratch.

    Now all we need is for the browser developers to take note of this, use it as a learning tool and a target to aim for and give the web design/development community a hell of a lot less stuff to debate about.

    It could happen...

    But of course, in addition to this they shouldn't let the acid2 test be a final goal and then just sit back and let themselves get rusty. Personally i'd like to see a publicly available acid test for all the new versions/revisions of CSS standards so that Joe Home User can more easily choose which browser to use. An acidN test once every 8 years?

    This is the fast moving world of technology, don't you know.

  • When every single major organisation and company in the business of implementing a standard fails I can't help wondering if the problem lies with the standard rather than the implementors. Just how hard is this?
  • Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test

    In a perfect world it should read "every browser fails the acid2 test". Instead somebody chooses to single out firefox and opera.

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