23 Musings

Good news in the browser standards war. Thins are really hotting up now as Opera has announced that their latest beta (or maybe even alpha) has passed the Acid3 test.

Let's see the responses from Mozilla and Microsoft as they try to get IE and Firefox up to speed...

Daily Tech has a good article detailing how the current most popular browsers fare with the newly released Acid3 test.

As expected it's way out of their reach. How close the final releases of Firefox 3 and IE8 will come is anyones guess. I reckon they won't pass either as IE8 only passed Acid2 when in private beta.

Hmm, not the most promising start for the newly released Beta of Internet Explorer 8!

Yes it's here. The final release of the Acid3 test happened today. Browser manufacturers should be quaking in their boots as it attempts to test their ability to render web standards compliant code. And it's not just CSS being tested, the new Acid3 test puts emphasis on a browsers' DOM scripting abilities as well as continuing to assess it's ability to render CSS, SVG and webfonts.

More in the press release. Can't wait to see how Firefox 3 and IE 8 fare...

The idea is to go here and hope that you see something like the image below (if you're truly standards compliant).

The Web Standards Project never stands still it seems. Hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing that IE8 could comply with Acid2 the standards gurus are preparing the next generation browser standard compliance test.

You can read some more about Acid3 here and even try it here (it won't work on any browser yet). They're also asking for suggestions of tests to add to Acid3 so if you have any ideas go here.

This is inconsequential to anyone who isn't either a developer or a standards junkie but it's newsworthy none the less. Microsoft have announced that Internet Explorer 8 (the next incarnation of the famous browser) has succesfully passed the acid test and rendered the well known face correctly.

This is a fantastic milestone in browser development! About a year ago Firefox 3.0 Alpha passed the same test (yet to hear about the beta), Safari and Opera are already there, so things really are moving forwards nicely in the web standards arena with Microsoft joining the party.

Now, please just make it more easy to use, lighter on the processor and less memory hungry (all this goes for Firefox too) and we'll really be getting somewhere!