Firefox Now Scores 100% on Acid3 Test | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Now Scores 100% on Acid3 Test

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Firefox now scores 100 on Acid3 about 16 months ago.

ha ha.

acid3 has updated itself, firefox is right there.

arpitnext, read before you respond stupidly.

Asa Dotzler is community coordinator for Mozilla, I think he knows what he's talking about...

My interpretation is that 16 months ago, Firefox stopped caring about Acid3 because the remaining points were disagreements on how to interpret the standard. Not because they were too lazy to fix it, because they had a point.

The fact that it has been resolved only now is irrelevant. If you take a Firefox 16 months old and run Acid3 on it now, it would score 100% - I think that's what he meant.

Dear nddrylliog,

AFAIK, Firefox has not introduced any change in order to score 100% on Acid3. If you read this article (http://browserfame.com/212/firefox-acid3-test-100), you will come to know that the developer of Acid3 test has introduced few changes in order to "update" the test. On the updated Acid3 scale, Firefox scores 100%. This simply indicates that Mozilla was correct!

I agree with you: "If you take a Firefox 16 months old and run Acid3 on it now, it would score 100% - I think that's what he meant.".

I am unable to understand your comment: "read before you respond stupidly.". Can you please explain my stupidity?

(FYI: I am also associated with Mozilla for long, as a volunteer.)

Oh well, here come the downvotes because I have been harsh. Woop de doo.

Yes, you're just repeating my (and pretty much everyone's) point here. Your stupidity was only to contradict Asa there, that's all.

You're doing that thing people do one the internet, when they see a disagreement that doesn't exist.

The poster wasn't contradicting asa at all, he was (a) laughing at asa's joke, and (b) trying to make his own.

Downvote him if you like for not contributing to the discussion, but your particular comment seemed completely unrelated to the content of his post.

And the downvote dance continues :) Not that I give a shit though, HN has continuously been going down the toilet for the last few years now.

Now it's mostly fanboyism, self-congratulation, oh and gratuitious downvotes without even reading or understanding people's posts.

Also, yeah, know even if Asa's was a half-joke, arpitnext's post was not a joke. Well, back to doing useful stuff now.

I upvoted you. Not because I think what you said is insightful, but because your post serves as a textbook example of a person who not only doesn't see how stupid and trollish his own post is, but also dismisses all forms of legit criticism as fanboyism.

Oh and don't forget he's ranting about how this site is going down hill while contributing nothing and pretty much making this piece of the thread unpleasant.

Yeah you're right, don't go to my comment history to judge whether I'm actually making useful contributions to HN.

I mean, surely 2-3 poorly written comments are enough to judge a few years of contributions. Bah.

Safari on my iPad got 100/100, but there was a small glitched box (bottom right) not on the reference page so it's obviously not a perfect test.

To fully pass the test you need to get 100/100, and for the animation to be smooth and the generated image to have the proper appearance. It is a little confusing that the test doesn't automatically check the other two things.

I can't think of any browser facility that would be able to verify the animation and final generated appearance. How would you do that?

Yeah, I don't think it's possible. But it is confusing that it isn't possible and therefore isn't done in this test.

Have browser send screenshot to Mechanical Turk and offer 1 cent for the answer to the question: "Is this image identical to this image?" :)

FWIW, my Firefox 6.0.2 gets 100/100 but the resulting image does NOT look, pixel-for-pixel, identical to the reference image. Ah, but I guess it's only required for default settings, so perhaps that is the problem - non-default settings on my end.

I'm pretty sure there's no way for a browser to take a screenshot of itself.

It's possible, but not perfect.

http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/

It's a subset of HTML and CSS, not the whole thing. Interesting though.

Click on the A in Acid3. It will show a dialogue box which will tell you if the animation lagged.

The acid3 test actually tests each step execution time, and reports it accordingly in case of failure.

I guess it can't test rendering conformance since that may require taking a shot of a part of the screen, which might just raise some security considerations if JS was allowing that.

IE9 on Windows 7 and IE9 on Windows Phone Mango (7712) also score 100% now.

Good news for sure, but the Mozilla Foundation has let the plugin updates vs supported plugins issue get away.

Firebug, YSlow, Web Developer and others don't work with the new version? OK fine but tell me first.

I reluctantly upgraded from FF 3.6 as FF has been my go-to development browser for years, but plugins I need to get work done kept breaking or were not installable to the FF version that FF thought I should have.

The Add-on Compatibility Reporter, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... , should help you install incompatible add-ons. Not sure if that helps you at all.

Are you running a beta version? Firebug, YSlow, and Web Developer are all compatible with the latest release version (Firefox 6):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/

If you installed them from addons.mozilla.org then you should get compatibility updates automatically and silently. If you installed them from elsewhere, you may need to check for updates manually (or switch to the a.m.o versions). In general, all add-ons hosted at a.m.o are updated to support new versions automatically: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili...

We do still have a lot of work to do to improve add-on compatibility for non-AMO-hosted extensions. The next planned step is to bundle something like Addon Compatibility Reported into Firefox itself.

I finally upgraded last weekend myself. I can definitely feel the speed over 3.6

Newest firebug and web developer definitely works with it.

The Status-4-Evar extension was a lifesaver though and I am still doing dozens of little tweaks.

This extension will allow all "incompatible" extensions to be activated and tested

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

and I found this one a must to return to dialogs instead of tabs for all the management

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=20630...

Chrome dev channel appears to get 100/100. There are a few odd things that flicker as it goes. It would be cool to see a play by play of the whole test.

Chrome Stable gets 100/100 too, and has been for quite some time. However, the final page didn't look exactly like the reference rendering. Now it does.

Nice. When will I be able to work in one tab without another able to slow it to a stop?

FF beta on Android 100/100.

Meh.

Last one in the bunch, even later than IE9, but something good nevertheless. Funny point in the article: FF passes the test not because of changes to FF, but because of changes to the Acid test :)

I seem to remember an article awhile back where someone from Mozilla wrote that they didn't care to make up the last X% of the test because (if I recall correctly) they didn't agree with the interpretation of the standards that made up the tiny bit they were failing on. They felt they were keeping true to the actual spec and that the Acid was incorrect and thus it was silly to conform just to get that 100/100. I may be mistaken but perhaps the Acid test has now come into line with whatever spec items they were disputing. IF this is the case then my kudos to the Mozilla team for not "conforming" just to conform.

Edit: found the link: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ So it was not wanting to put in partial implementations when a final spec wasn't complete yet just to pass a test.

Edit again: Even Firefox 3.6 now scores a 99/100

This is great and all for Mozilla, but the team at MS working on IE didn't have this luxury. If they took a plublic stance against an aspect of the test (even if completely legitimate) they would be ridiculed by the tech press.

It is not a luxury, it is a benefit of the credibility Mozilla has worked hard over many years to build.

Not only did they have the luxury, they took advantage of it. See http://news.softpedia.com/news/IE9-Platform-Preview-3-Scores... or http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/acid3/default.h...

In a sense they were ahead of the game: they took a principled stance not to partially implement standards they considered unnecessary, just to score extra points on Acid3.

The change to the test is (to some degree) an acknowledgement that they were right on this.

But what about the users and the creators of the web? What if they would feel that these standards would be necessary? Whenever one of the other, large companies takes this stance on a standard - Apple, Microsoft, whathaveyou - people begin complaining, but for some reason, this time, as well as several other times when it has involved Mozilla and their frowning upon certain standards (MPEG-4 AVC f.e.) it's all thumbs up and smiles. What's your take on this?

Not all reasons for rejecting a standard are equal.

People don't thumbs up and smile at all. Have you not seen all the complaints on Reddit and Slashdot about Firefox lagging behind on ACID3 compliance?

Not only on ACID3 - any discussion about HTML5 video has plenty of criticism to Mozilla.

Not everything is subjective. I find Mozilla's arguments here convincing, so I give a thumbs up and a smile. :)

Uh... IE9 failed the SVG fonts parts of the test just like Gecko did, and for similar reasons.

Apparently, what's good enough for American education is good enough for grading web browsers: if your pupils aren't learning, give them easier tests.

It's still a misleading headline, though.

The test itself was misleading, and has now been updated to better reflect reality.

In your analogy, it would be as if pupils were given tests with some irrelevant questions, and the tests later revised to focus just on proper subject material.

I thought the point of the Acid tests weren't to reflect reality but to encourage web developers to support useful but unsupported parts of the standards.

I shouldn't have said 'reality', sorry. I should have said, 'relevant standards'. Acid3 used to include some deprecated standards that are no longer relevant, and has finally been updated to remove those things.

Firefox's arguments for not really bothering with the remaining parts of Acid3 was that it seemed like it they weren't testing particularly relevant standards and that the implementations of the other browsers for those standards were mostly to pass Acid3 and not particularly useful either. See http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ for more info.

That seems like valid reasoning to me. I've also seen Hixie make comments that seem to indicate him wanting to avoid these issues for any potential Acid4:

When we do Acid4 (probably around the time we have at least three major browsers shipping Acid3-passing browsers), I think we'll have to focus on testing fewer, more critical things. Acid3 tests a lot of critical stuff, but also checks a lot of less important stuff at the same time, and it's in those areas that we've had the most problems with specs changing under us.

From http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1215829569

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