23 Musings

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).

Finally Internet Explorer is going to come of age (or perhaps reach puberty). Microsoft have announced that, by default, the rendering engine in IE8 will support all the current web standards (yes those ones IE7 has such problems with).

This is a great day for web designers. Could this be the end of workarounds to get your site browser compatible? Maybe, for a short time, but then as standards move on I'm sure one of the major browsers will lag behind again.

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!