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Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test 418

Posted by CmdrTaco from the both-users-celebrate dept.
Rytis writes "Opera has just become the second browser after Safari to be able to pass completely the famous ACID2 test. Mark Wilton-Jones is running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID tests. Of course, it includes a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the nice happy face saying "Hello world!"."
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Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test More

Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test

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  • Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:4, Informative)

    by GraZZ ( 9716 ) <jack@[ ]kmaninov.ca ['jac' in gap]> on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:09AM (#14902344) Homepage Journal
    Actually, Konqueror passed second. Some might say this is less of an achievment since the fixes that allowed Safari to pass could be more easily ported into the Konqueror codebase, but I still think the OSS project that passed Acid2 first should probably get more respect on /. ;)

    Info here [kdedevelopers.org].

    • Re:Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:5, Informative)

      by Derek Pomery ( 2028 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:12AM (#14902356)
      RTFA and you'll see this.
      "Opera 9 (get the weekly build) now passes the Acid 2 test, making it the second browser to do so. And yes, I can count. Safari passed first, and Opera is second. Konqueror and iCab almost pass (and claim to pass), but they both fail to apply one of the styles required by the test..."

    • Re:Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:5, Insightful)

      by babbling ( 952366 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:17AM (#14902371)
      I don't think this should be judged based on how much of an achievement it is. The important part is that the browser passes the ACID2 test. How hard it was for each individual browser to get there is not important.

      Who got there first also isn't important, we just need all browsers to get there.

    • It claims to but fails (Score:5, Informative)

      by Momomoto ( 118483 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:19AM (#14902377) Homepage
      FTA:

      "Konqueror and iCab almost pass (and claim to pass), but they both fail to apply one of the styles required by the test, and as a result they display a scrollbar even though they shouldn't (the Acid 2 guide neglects to mention this style, but see the source code for the test itself):

      html { ... overflow: hidden; /* hides scrollbars on viewport, see 11.1.1:3 */ ... }"

    • Re:Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bralkein ( 685733 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:30AM (#14902424)
      Well, since KHTML and KJS (I think?) were ported over to Mac OS in the first place in order to create Safari, which then allowed the Apple devs to create the patches that allowed it to pass Acid2, patches which could not then be easily applied back to KHTML and KJS because the code sometimes didn't meet KDE's standards or because the patches were sometimes not supplied in a format that they could easily work with, maybe the KDE devs put in more effort overall :-P

      But seriously, who gives a shit who came first, second or whatever; I think the important thing is that browser developers are obviously making an effort to ensure stricter standards compliance. I assume someone must be working on this for Firefox, so does anybody know when we can expect to see Firefox pass Acid2 as well?

      • Re:Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:4, Informative)

        by Derek Pomery ( 2028 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:43AM (#14902468)
        https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=acid2
        Track Gecko progress here.  Including screenshots.
        Link as plain text due to /. referers being blocked.
        • This is a bug tracking tool and not a news site. People need this to get their work done. We don't want this slashdotted for a reason.
          • Duh.
            And anyone who wants to check up on the bug can copy and paste the URL.
            There is nothing wrong with that.
            The referer block does exactly what it should. Reduce reflexive clicking/tab opening, and making it a conscious descision by folks who want to look at it.

            So folks. Don't listen to oglueck here - perfectly alright to visit the link if you have an interest, and even, yes, post *informative* commentary in the bug (such as regressions, related bugs, progress in recent builds, etc)

  • ACID passed, real world? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toomanyhandles ( 809578 ) * on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:10AM (#14902346)
    Great that they pass the ACID test, but the real-world is just not perfect or by-the-book. They need to be able to handle what really happens, too. Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.
    • I agree with you on that. It can pass all the certifications it wants, but until Opera supports some of the more basic javscript methods IE and FF have no problem with, it will never be my browser of choice.

      • For example? Please keep in mind the article is referring to Opera 9.0 Preview 2 (latest snapshop, according to here [opera.com]), which Opera notifies against the use of previews.

        preview

        • of an experimental nature
        • distributed to a limited audience, i.e. forums, newsgroups, and IRC
        • should never be installed over a final release
        • not to be used as a substitute for a final release

        beta

        • available for all users, but recommended only for advanced users
        • thoroughly tested, though known to contain bugs
        • usually feature-compl
        • Technically, this is a weekly build. (Windows Build 8265, Macintosh Build 3264, UNIX Build 145)

          "The Weekly Builds are snapshots, they are not as thoroughly tested as a Technology Preview or a Public Beta. You should only use these builds if you are not afraid of losing data (e-mail, bookmarks, anything) or crashing your computer." - Opera Desktop Team

          I don't know what the original complaint was with respect to compatibility. My browser is Opera, and the only sites I have problems with are those that del

      • Re:ACID passed, real world? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:52AM (#14902497)
        I agree with you on that. It can pass all the certifications it wants, but until Opera supports some of the more basic javscript methods IE and FF have no problem with, it will never be my browser of choice.

        The problems with Opera's JS arise in three situations:

        1) The site specifically blocks out Opera due to scripts 5-6 years old, but happily copypasted throughout the web project by brainless "web designers". Or server-side sniffing, like Yahoo did and still does, AFAIK.

        See here for example, one that I found just a few minutes ago when informing myself of the latest and greatest Bollywood hit: http://www.rangdebasanti.net/ [rangdebasanti.net]

        Their JS code contains this:
        var dom=document.getElementById&&navigator.userAgent.i ndexOf("Opera")==-1 ...
        if (ie||dom) ...
        Use Proxomitron or Opera's cloaking techniques to get rid of the "Opera" part in UA string, and what do you know, the site works perfectly!

        2) The site doesn't block Opera per se, but exhibits "if IE or Netscape" behaviour. Of course Firefox deals with those, as it descends from Netscape. Opera doesn't, and Opera is not IE, either, so it end up in no man's land...

        3) The site has JS errors, and Opera is pretty strict when parsing JS, more so than Firefox or IE.

        Honestly, Opera does not have any JS issues. None whatsoever. It's brainless webmonkeys who have issues with their JavaScript.
        • 2) The site doesn't block Opera per se, but exhibits "if IE or Netscape" behaviour. Of course Firefox deals with those, as it descends from Netscape. Opera doesn't, and Opera is not IE, either, so it end up in no man's land...

          Actually, the real problem with Opera is that it tries to support both W3 DOM standards as well as IE's crazy broken stuff, but then goes on to do some things differently to IE. So, if because IE is broken in some regard and you check for a certain DOM element or function existence
        • I am sorry but opera does have broken javascript.

          getElementById confuses name and id. If you have an item with a name that is the same as the id you are looking for if the name was defined first then opera will return that. That is flat out broken behavior and it was copied from IE and it is still broken in Opera 9. http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/Opera9Bu gs/ [gtalbot.org] Look at bug 17 for the example.

          That is the reason why neither opera or IE are supported for our more advanced editing interfaces. It just
    • Two sides to this: (1) conformance for developers (makes our lives easier) (2) compatibility for consumers (they don't care about making our lives easier)
      --
      graphicallyspeaking [kotay.com]

    • Re:ACID passed, real world? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:24AM (#14902393)
      Could you be a little more vague? It's not unexpected for browsers with different rendering engines to render things differently, especially for web interfaces, very especially if it comes from Microsoft.

      Moreover, it's a fallacy to expect a browser to "work in all situations". I'm sure there are plenty of real-world situations where Firefox fails as well, and where Safari were to succeed in it's place. It's tests like ACID2 that determine a browsers capability to handle all situations.

      The problem Safari is having with Exchange is very likely due to poor coding. Considering it's from Microsoft (you said Exchange web interface, right?), I'm sure Microsoft implemented a slew of hacks to have Firefox compliance (Microsoft is well known for improper web developing practices, to put it lightly).
      • Considering it's from Microsoft (you said Exchange web interface, right?), I'm sure Microsoft implemented a slew of hacks to have Firefox compliance (Microsoft is well known for improper web developing practices, to put it lightly).

        I would not doubt Microsoft employs people, who's only job is to make sure their web based products DON'T work with anything except IE. Lets not forget Front Page generates broken code, which IE knows how to render correctly. I've never seen anything except IE work with

      • It's not unexpected for browsers with different rendering engines to render things differently, especially for web interfaces

        I question that. I know the original idea was to let the browser determine the appearance, but the idea never really caught on. Content producers want control over appearance, and most users/clients don't particularly want the responsibility. The byzantine web standards for separating content from presentation all the way down to the client aren't worth the bother and compatibil

    • Re:ACID passed, real world? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:43AM (#14902467) Homepage
      ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.

      First off that one hasn't been built, as I've seen IE manage to screw up royally too on sites claiming to work with IE, sometimes only with IE. The trouble with trying to match IE bug for bug is that you can't succeed as you can never duplicate the implementation exactly, you need to render pages wrong according to the standard, and worst of all it is never predictable. I really hate "trial-and-error" programming, and IE is the worst of the bunch.

      In your case, you're trying to use MS generated HTML. I'm sure the fact that Firefox can render it is completely accidental and will be fixed in the next Exchange service pack. You can't expect a company that has a vested business interest in not playing nice, to play nice. The ACID2 test is an assurance that if I code to the standard, I will see none (or at least very few) rendering issues on any browser (except IE). That is very reassuring to people who think "OMG supporting five browsers, do I have to make 5x the number of hacks?" No, you don't. In fact, you'll code to one standard and fix hacks for one browser. Which is actually better than to code to zero standards and fix hacks for one browser...
    • What would be really really nice is if the target browser for real world applications could even get close to passing a standard test. For many years now we've been forced to put the cart before the horse to support IE due to it's dominance on the desktop. Personally I've spent an additional 40 hours in just the last two months hacking around IEs lack of CSS2 support for web projects I've worked on.

      Seriously these layouts worked perfectly in Safari, Firefox, Opera the first time around... just based on stan

    • Safari hates malformed pages (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kherr ( 602366 ) <kevin&puppethead,com> on Sunday March 12, 2006 @11:17AM (#14902566) Homepage
      Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.

      There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?

      A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup [mozillazine.org]. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.

      That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List [opendarwin.org] was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.
      • More precisely, a browser is free to render invalid pages ANY way it wants - as the standard doesn't say how to render non-standards :-)
        • More precisely, a browser is free to render invalid pages ANY way it wants - as the standard doesn't say how to render non-standards :-)

          Once upon a time, the standard was to not render nonstandards - were that it were still the standard now, instead of the nonstandard ...

    • Interesting, has your company modified it somehow? I'm not super familiar with Exchange, so I don't know how modifiable, or 'skin-able' if you will, it is.

      I do know that the University I work for uses Exchange, and Safari from my Mac works just fine. I see it almost exactly how I see it from Firefox.

      And trust me, at this backwards little campus, there is not a lot of concern for non-MS situations, so I know they didn't do any modifying to make 3rd party browsers work, at least not on purpose.

  • Tweaked (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Stellian ( 673475 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:12AM (#14902354)
    What's more interesting, will it pass ACID3? It's easy to tweak the engine untill it passes a single known test. Historicaly, Opera had (and still has?) problems with both JavaScript and CSS. I must admit though, that the rendering in Opera 8 (pre ACID2) is much better than Mozilla's.

  • Good news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BertieBaggio ( 944287 ) * <bob.manics@eu> on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:26AM (#14902404) Homepage

    A big well done to the Opera team. Safari passed the test in November last year, and hopefully Firefox will pass soon as well. Increased standards compliace is a Good Thing(tm) for users and webmasters alike. If the minority browsers continue to push standards (which the tech-savvy webmasters follow) it will push IE into improving its own rendering engine. Although even their unreleased version seems to be a bit behind the times...

    From TFA: It is somewhat worrying that IE 6 renders Acid 2 very similarly to Opera 3.6, and the hyped IE 7 renders it very similarly to Opera 4.

    'Somewhat worrying' indeed. I know people (of the pretty-damn-computer-literate variety) that won't switch from IE6 because it "works fine for them". I'm sure they know about the vulnerabilities [now that Symantec says so, it must be official!], the rendering issues and speed*, but they are sticking to their guns. So the only way people like this will have their experience enhanced is by teams like Mozilla and Opera pushing the browser envelope and hoping IE take interest. Either that or some X factor that makes the alternative browser a 'killer app', rather than IE, which is an app killer. (I couldn't resist, sorry!)

    Well done again to Opera. Webmasters everywhere are silently saying a big 'thank you'.

    *Note: I am aware that some will say that IE 6 loads quicker/renders quicker than FF. I have found the two of comparable speed for light pages, and FF slightly faster for 'heavier' pages. Opera is faster than both of them. Draw your own conclusions, and install all three (or two if your run a non-Windows OS). I found an old demo disc with IE 3 recently, and will be trying that out.

  • I like how... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by katterjohn ( 726348 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:27AM (#14902408)
    ... they show IE screenshots, but don't show how close/far away Netscape and Mozilla and Firefox are from passing.

    • ...don't show how close/far away Netscape and Mozilla and Firefox are from passing.

      Happy to help! Firefox 1.5 is nearer to Opera 8 than Opera 7.5: the background is yellow (good), the eyes aren't quite right (bad, comparable to Opera 8) and the mouth has turned into a cigar (bad, Opera 8 does this better).

      Sorry, best I can do without getting off my backside and doing something useful with screenshots. And I'm not going to get off my backside on a Sunday.

  • Internet Explorer getting better (Score:5, Funny)

    by eebra82 ( 907996 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:33AM (#14902431) Homepage
    I am happy to see that Internet Explorer 7 passes the ACID2 test somewhat better now. It is actually possible to see the resemblance of a happy face now. Good job, Microsoft!

  • who was first after safari? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:38AM (#14902449)
    Opera has just become the second browser after Safari...

    Second browser after Safari? Which was the first after Safari to do it? Oh, you mean the second browser, after Safari...It's amazing what commas can do. Learn to use them.

  • An ACID test giving a smiley? (Score:5, Funny)

    by G3ckoG33k ( 647276 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:48AM (#14902483)
    Is that a coincidence?

  • See how your browser fares... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fugas ( 619989 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @10:52AM (#14902495) Homepage
    Take the ACID2 [webstandards.org] test...

  • Yeah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, 2006 @11:18AM (#14902568)
    Can opera handle third party cookies properly yet? A little more important than styles rendering in my opinion.

    • Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @01:41PM (#14903040) Journal
      Can you be more specific what's not handled correctly? I can block third party cookies, I can manually delete third party cookies, and I can allow them, and the cookie settings seem to reflect they're not added when they should, and respected when they're allowed. If you're talking about a specific bug here, you must be much more clear about what you're talking about.
  • Firefox comes pretty close to passing the test, but not quite. Its performance falls somewhere between Opera 7.5 and 8.0, but sadly I haven't the means to post my own screenshot. However, curious users can go ahead and take the test themselves right here: http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

    Also, It would appear that Opera 9 has just one thing wrong - the nose. It's not supposed to be blue, it's supposed to be black, as per the sample rendering here: http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.html

  • More elaborate history (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @11:23AM (#14902592) Journal
    Mark Wilton-Jones is running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID test

    There's a more useful history about it here [timaltman.com] (in reverse chronological order), describing what exactly the standard compliance problems were, and how they fixed them, starting with Opera 8.00.

    And go to the Opera Desktop Team blog [opera.com] to download the actual build that works with this. However, note that this build should be treated like a Firefox nightly, and there may be some pretty serious rendering regressions, doing currently more damage to the layout engine than good from following the Acid2 test. ;-)

  • big deal (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, 2006 @11:43AM (#14902657)
    i know a guy who passed the acid test back in college... twice!
  • This is all very fine and good but what I really want is to use my credit union's website with something other than IE. Alas, whatever microsoft extensions they use prevent my doing so. The problem is less that a given browser won't display rare font/layout X properly but that some hosts use proprietary programming techniques for their website.
    • The problem is less that a given browser won't display rare font/layout X properly but that some hosts use proprietary programming techniques for their website.

      The real problem is that such hosts don't see anything wrong with that.

  • I saw IE7 fail this on the CeBit today (Score:3, Informative)

    by MikTheUser ( 761482 ) on Sunday March 12, 2006 @04:00PM (#14903588)
    I just came form the CeBit, where dozens of proud Microsoft representants were showing Windwows Vista, Office 2007 and of course the IE 7 ("We've got these 'tabs' now!" - yes, they said that).

    I convinced one of them to open the ACID2 test in the IE7 (Google was blocked and he told me to use MSN Search, but I fired up Seekport). It was the worst rendering of the ACID2 I've ever seen. The entire screen was red, except for a few lines and dots here and there, and scrollbar in the nothing way over to the right.

    Of course, the Microsoftie was quick to say, it's all only beta...

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