Firefox 3.5 Hits Release Candidate Milestone 202
macupdate writes "Firefox 3.5rc1 has started trickling to users (mirrors and appropriate pages should all be updated soon). You can read the release notes. RC1 still scores a 93/100 on the Acid3 test."
Beta "99" (Score:3, Insightful)
Beta 99 [mozilla.com]
93/100... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A little anti clamantic... (Score:5, Insightful)
yet don't work 100% in real world webpages. Standards compliant be damned if you can't render real pages.
Extensions (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:93/100... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't I have mod points today?
The parent is so right. The video tag means that youtube and all the web streaming websites can work without Flash. And since Firefox users update quickly, this means 20% of Internet users will be able to do that within 6 months. That's pretty big when you think some people try to make us believe that HTML5 is 10 years away...
Re:A little anti clamantic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Such as...? I use Safari (at home) and Konqueror (at work) nearly exclusively and haven't had problems with these mythical IE-and-Firefox-only pages.
93/100 (Score:3, Insightful)
RC1 still scores a 93/100 on the Acid3 test.
Minefield has scored 94/100 for quite some time now, so I doubt Shiretoko will score any better at release.
Re:93/100... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still the slowest browser. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:v3.5 and still no MSI package for Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that Google Chrome will get corporate friendly before Firefox.
Firefox doesn't really have a plan for targeting business users - it's as if they don't understand corporate needs!
* Redirect update server to internal corporate network so they can test new releases before updating the corporate desktops.
* Fine-grained control at the policy level over installable extensions, themes, plugins. I.e., stop users installing their own, define a set of standard corporate extensions, and so on.
* Can run those internal designed-for-IE6-by-inept-programmers websites, that the company has no budget to update.
And I'm sure many many more can be thought of by people who actually work in corporate IT departments.
Re:93/100... (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about Acid tests is that specs are ambiguous: there are often multiple possible meanings to a given section, and inevitable different people will implement them in different ways. Some of those will be incompatible, yet both can claim compliance, so this helps no one. Tests, on the other hand, are unambiguous: either you pass or you do not.
This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but on the test suites. Acid tests are not perfect at this, but they are light-years better than previous practice. If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again, they are going to have to start taking these tests seriously, and that means 100% as soon as possible.
They've improved over Acid2, at least, when even iCab -a browser developed by one person- beat them to full compliance by months. But they still have a long way to go. When major tests like this are developed, 100% needs to be a dealbreaker goal for the next major release, not something put off until 2-3 big releases in the future. Opera gets this, and the WebKit folks get this. Mozilla used to, back in the days of the first CSS Acid Test. But somewhere along the way, they lost sight of it, and they need to be reminded.
Re:93/100... (Score:1, Insightful)
Acid tests are designed to highlight rendering bugs in current browsers, giving browser developers a chance to easily see where something is going wrong.
ACID isn't comprehensive enough to do this, and futhermore it encourages browser vendors to develop for the test.
In practice ACID acts to promote adoption of bleeding edge features (some of which aren't even standardized yet), and quantitiavely says IE sucks. As an actual QA tool or something web developers need to worry about, it's mostly useless.
Re:H.264 or Theora? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A little anti clamantic... (Score:2, Insightful)
yet don't work 100% in real world webpages. Standards compliant be damned if you can't render real pages.
What?
If the browser follows web standards 100% and yet some webpages render incorrectly - doesn't this mean the issue is with the web page and not with the browser?
Web standards exist so that we shouldn't have to answer the question of whether the web browser is designed for the web pages or whether the web pages are designed for the browser.