Congrats to the IE team on IE8’s passing of the Acid2 test
38 CommentsPublished December 20th, 2007 1:21 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
There was some really exciting news coming out of the Internet Explorer team yesterday. On their blog, they posted a screenshot showing an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) passing the Acid2 test.
The Acid2 test has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that are part of web standards.
Safari and Konqueror were the first of the browsers to pass the Acid2 test. Opera quickly followed with the release of Opera 9. The upcoming Opera Mobile 9 also passes the test, as does Firefox 3, which is currently out in beta.
Joining the list is IE8.
This is exciting and a positive step in the right direction for Microsoft and the Web. Hopefully this signals a change in heart regarding the future of Web standards support in IE.
Good work guys!
(Screenshot of IE8 passing the Acid2 test)
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Maybe this means that all this lawsuit nonsense will be dropped…
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Thanks!
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Who is DM? Dean Machamovitch?
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HardRoc:
1. It is not a lawsuit.
2. Acid2 tests only a tiny part of a few standards. Passing Acid2 does not necessarily mean that a browser is standards compliant overall.
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Yes, but what will happen to the EC complaint.? IE 8 may be released only after 1 year.
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5 comments – 4 differnet OS 4 different browsers!!
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Crazy isn’t it…
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“what will happen to the EC complaint”
Nothing? Acid2 does not test overall standards compliance.
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The timing is suspicious. But otherwise, great news!
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I agree with Jadd. The timing is very suspicious! Either they just mocked up that screenshot to get Opera to get of their backs or they really have managed to clear that test in a matter of months. The latter sounds very impossible.
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Don’t get too exicited according the blog “Daily Apps” ( http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/internet-explorer-8-clears-acid2-really/ ) there maybe some big caviats to this announcement.
It is suggested that the test is not working at 100% and it is not passing browsers that already passed while IE8, in a special mode, does.
maybe this announcement was a little premature
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Congratulations.
It’s not something that is done over night, that’s for sure. But there is no time to relax. ECMA 4, CCS3, SVG, XHTML for real, and HTML5 somewhere in there. But this really showsthat something is going on except naming products. I just hope Silverlight is not taking too much efforts away from the JS engine. Silverlight will probably be a great thing, but the web will lag behind if JS and the rest is put on hold to get it done. But it sure is a step in the right direction. If only Microsoft could be a bit more transparent on these issues tension would maybe not build up like this…The standard is not secret anyway, so what is there to be secret about.
- ØØ -
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How ironical I’d find out about it on this site! I knew the IE team was working on standards, but this is great news, well beyond the results I could have imagined. And thanks for giving credit where it is due, it reflects OperaWatch’s integrity…
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Shame that both Opera 9.25 and 9.50 Weekly now both FAIL the ACID2 test..
Whats going on????
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@Mark: Yeah – I just noticed that too. It used to work in previous versions… Goldman included an explanatory link, but it doesn’t currently work: http://operawatch.com/news/2007/12/opera-925-released.html#comment-70325
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Yes, Congratulations to them.
Regarding this possibly being a mockup, there is a video linked on their blog where they show it. Of course they could fake that, too but it’s at least little more unlikely
And even if it’s not actually passing now, they will have to make it pass for the first public release anyways, now that they announced it.
Entering the address.. the movie quality is not so good so it’s hard to read..
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/9964/ie801ge1.png
click..
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/5918/ie802xx2.png
and passed..
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/6966/ie803xj2.png
.. well almost passed, I’d say because it is still showing the scrollbar. (Like iCab and Safari did in their first versions, that “passed).
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The test broke. There is a backup, and it works in all those browsers where it worked before, including IE8. The reason is that http://www.webstandards.org/404/ is now returning OK/200. I guess webstandards.org have done some upgrading and broken it without knowing it.
- ØØ -
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looks like IE 8 almost passed the test because i see a scrollbar in the third picture that Daiwai posted.
from http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/
iCab and Konqueror almost passed (and claimed to pass) before Opera, but they both failed to apply one of the styles required by the test, and as a result they displayed a scrollbar even though they shouldn’t.
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I remember when I was at school and used to come last in races. I’d get a pitying round of applause, too.
“Well done, IE!”
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Finally!
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Good job team IE!
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Congratz to the IE team, about time.
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Sorry, but scrollbar = FAIL.
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Let’s just say the already dominant IE complies FULLY to web standards- sometime in the (hypothetical) future. How, then, will Opera make up all that lost ground (in terms of usage stats) between them?
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@ Ehud it would actually be an advantage over the current situation for Opera, as they would only have to implement one version (that of the W3C) of each standard instead of also having to emulate IE quirks mode.
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Ehud
Opera’s biggest problems is that sites aren’t working. Sites aren’t working because they are designed for IE and not standards. If they were designed for standards they would work in Opera.
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but they work in FF, so they werent designed in ie-only approach. and if FF can manage to serve them well, why opera cant?
maybe because opera insists to go its own path, instead of following the bigger brothers? (in gray areas, that are quite common in w3c ’standards’)
want examples? why JS date format is different in opera? even wandered what are the implications for this? there are tens if not more of such things opera did upstream, asking itself for inevitable troubles. and now it is ‘ie only coding’? BS!
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“If they were designed for standards they would work in Opera.”
both digg and deviantart are coded with standards in mind, both fail at some point in opera. care to explain?
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“but they work in FF, so they werent designed in ie-only approach. and if FF can manage to serve them well, why opera cant?”
The main reasons are:
1. Web designers always designed for both IE and Netscape back in the day. When the new Gecko based Netscape was released (before Firefox), lots of sites updated to support it because they were used to doing so with NS4. Firefox could simply “freeload” off of this.
2. Market share.
“maybe because opera insists to go its own path, instead of following the bigger brothers?”
This is obviously false since Opera by their own statements work actively on compatibility. Opera supports a huge number of things just be compatible with other browsers, such as document.all.
“want examples? why JS date format is different in opera?”
You’ll have to do better than that. ANd there are lots of examples of similar things in Firefox.
“both digg and deviantart are coded with standards in mind, both fail at some point in opera. care to explain?”
Neither of these are even close to standards compliant.
Sorry, but again you’ll have to do better than that.
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Digg and devianart fail? No they don’t. They work fine in Opera.
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Not only do they not fail in Opera, but they also don’t validate. They are far from standards compliant.
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dont know about devianart but digg works great in opera also digg is a lot faster for me in opera than in firefox or ie
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you need only one part of a website to fail in a browser to make it ‘browser A uncompatible’
yes, you can read digg’s main page, no, you cant use 100% of its functionality, same goes with deviantart
and as for the validator, operawatch.com also fails now, due to wrong object placement in the code. so what?
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http://www.officelive.com/
try this link in opera, try it in firefox. see a difference?
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The difference is that you keep changing the subject after your claims have been refuted.
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and you DO like to change your nicknames, and UA strings, nelson. double standards it seems, as Daniel does nothing with it.
and btw. you saing something is FAR from refuting anything. youll have to do better, like you know, provide facts, not opera press relases.
“ANd there are lots of examples of similar things in Firefox.”
difference is, firefox has 20-40% marketshare and somehow it always, in gray areas, goes the IE-way, just to avoid troubles. and it is your first chance to say something different than opera press relases – if there are lots, state at least 5. until then – please be quiet.
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Okay, I’m confused. I am using a browser, its the AT&T/SBC Yahoo! one. I’m not sure what the second picture on the Acid 2 test is supposed to look like. I went to the website, took it, and ended with a similar picture to the IE8 one. What is the messed-up picture supposed to look like?
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The messed up picture is supposed to look like that smiley. The smiley you see is just a picture of what the smiley should look like it your browser knew what it was doing.
But looks like we congratulated the IE team too soon. If today’s decision is final, IE will never pass the Acid 2 test. Maybe we should just call CSS2 for IE7 instead, and then change the recommendations accordingly
- ØØ -