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Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Mar 12, 2006 10:06 AM
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!"."

Related Stories

[+] First Look At the ACID3 Browser Test 104 comments
ddanier writes "Now that all major browsers have mastered the ACID2 test (at least in some preview versions), work on ACID3 has begun. The new test will focus on ECMAScript, DOM Level 3, Media Queries, and data: URLs. 100 tests will be put into functions each returning either true or false depending on the result of the test. The current preview of ACID3 is still missing 16 tests."
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  • Konqueror passed 2nd (Score:4, Informative)

    by GraZZ (9716) <jack@noSPAm.jackmaninov.ca> on Sunday March 12 2006, @10:09AM (#14902344) Homepage
    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].
  • 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.
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by damn_hippy (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @10:15AM
      • Re:ACID passed, real world? by IHSW (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @10:36AM
      • 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.
        [ Parent ]
    • AGREED:ACID passed, real world? by sreekotay (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @10:23AM
    • 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).
      [ Parent ]
    • 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...
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by foniksonik (Score:3) Sunday March 12 2006, @10:45AM
    • Safari hates malformed pages (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kherr (602366) <kevinNO@SPAMpuppethead.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.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by vlad_grigorescu (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @11:31AM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by MerlinTheWizard (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @12:12PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by Shawn Parr (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @12:24PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by golgotha007 (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:02PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by MikeFM (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:34PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by aussie_a (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @02:50PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by Pollardito (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @02:59PM
    • ACID2 useless test now by miro f (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @05:06PM
    • Re:ACID passed, real world? by jibjibjib (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @06:03PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • 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.
    • Re:Tweaked by darkmeridian (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @12:43PM
      • Re:Tweaked by zopu (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:35PM
        • Re:Tweaked by Petrushka (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @02:58PM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Tweaked by vcv (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:06PM
      • Re:Tweaked by Per Wigren (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:23PM
        • Re:Tweaked by starwed (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @04:46PM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Tweaked (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FyRE666 (263011) on Sunday March 12 2006, @01:24PM (#14902987) Homepage
        Opera 9 still displays visual artifacts when using DHTML/DOM Scripting/(whatever people are calling it this week). I recently coded up a quick demo for a bigger project - the demo allowed an image to be uploaded, resized and moved about using Javascript, then "stamped out" by using js+php. I only tested Opera out of interest as It's always been pretty flaky with Javascript/CSS. Moving images with the mouse was fine, but resizing (in the app, this was done by grabbing a corner and moving it) resulted in pixel trails which looked kind of cool, but were not supposed to be there. The "fix", was to continually change the z-index of the image as it was being resized, causing Opera to refresh the canvas.

        The reason Opera is "victimised" by older scripts is due to the ridiculous decision of that company to add code stubs for functions it did not actually support (I remember when it had document.getElementById(), which always returned null - that's why many scripts look for the Opera string, and block it).
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Tweaked by makomk (Score:3) Sunday March 12 2006, @02:25PM
        • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Tweaked by MikeFM (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @01:38PM
  • Get the weekly (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2006, @10:15AM (#14902365)
    Remember that http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/show.dml/1723 75 [opera.com]the weekly which passes Acid2 has been released publicly :)
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • ICab and Konquerer don't pass (Score:1, Redundant)

    by bas.westerbaan (917678) on Sunday March 12 2006, @10:23AM (#14902391) Homepage
    From the article:
    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)
  • Good news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BertieBaggio (944287) * 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.

    • Re:Good news by NoMoreNicksLeft (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @07:00PM
      • Re:Good news by dreemernj (Score:1) Sunday March 12 2006, @08:03PM
        • Re:Good news by NoMoreNicksLeft (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @10:05PM
  • I like how... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by katterjohn (726348) <katterjohn@gmail.com> 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.
  • 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.
  • 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...
  • by loyukfai (837795) on Sunday March 12 2006, @11:09AM (#14902535) Homepage
    Encouraging that one more browser can now pass the test maybe, and no doubt more and more will follow suit, when will the Browser pass the test?
  • Who the hell cares (Score:1, Interesting)

    by orionware (575549) on Sunday March 12 2006, @11:09AM (#14902538)
    I wrote off Opera the when they came out with v8 and decided to tell the user every time that they visited a site not using a 256bit key that the site cert was defective. I wasted countless hours trying to assure our clients that their users contacting them was nothing to worry about. The opera folks trumped the firefox arrogance and assumed that since Verisign had just started selling 256bit certs, then all sites should immediately upgrad their cert regardless of cost or validity of their current cert. Maybe they were receiving checks from Verisign?
  • 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.
      [ Parent ]
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • For the curious - (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RoffleTheWaffle (916980) on Sunday March 12 2006, @11:23AM (#14902591) Journal
    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!
    • twice? by commodoresloat (Score:2) Sunday March 12 2006, @04:21PM