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Acid3 test sends browsers back to square one


By David Worthington
March 17, 2008 — 
Although the motto of the new Acid3 browser test isn’t “Every browser left behind,” that’s the situation facing Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and the others in the market.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) upped the ante with browser makers on March 3, challenging them to pass Acid3, its newest test for standards compliance. The Acid tests are designed to expose rendering flaws in Web browsers, evaluating how Web browsers implement standards. But some observers question the relevance of the test, for a variety of reasons

According WaSP, Acid3 is designed for the so-called Web 2.0 era. It runs a series of 100 short tests to determine whether browsers adhere to ECMAScript 262—more familiarly implemented as JavaScript and JScript—and the W3C’s DOM 2 (Document Object Model) standards, which are collectively known as DOM Scripting.

The full list of specifications that Acid3 tests against can be found on the WaSP Web page.

WaSP’s founders created the original Acid test in 1997 to highlight the shortcomings of browser support for CSS style sheets. That was followed by the Acid2 test in 2005, with the purpose of exposing flaws in how browsers support CSS, HTML and the PNG graphics format.

Burton Group analyst Craig Roth remarked that although it was “nice” to see how browsers conform to standards, the results are merely interesting from an enterprise point of view. Roth claimed that most enterprises would perform their own risk analysis to target which browsers they should support and test their applications against those browsers.

“Ultimately, there is no substitute for testing against the browsers their audience is using,” he said.

No major browser passed the Acid3 test at its launch, but one company may have a good explanation for its showing.

NPD Group analyst Chris Swenson, who covers Microsoft, questioned the accuracy of the Acid3 test, saying that some problems could be attributed to how the test itself is hosted and not necessarily the result of how a particular browser renders a test. As he put it, “the relative placement of the domain from which the test and the fallback are hosted” can affect these numbers; according to him, the problem is how IE performs cross-domain security checks on objects, not with how the browser renders the page. Likewise, Microsoft’s Phil Nachreiner, a developer on the IE team, pointed out in an early March post to the IE blog that there appeared to be a problem related to similar checks on ActiveX controls.

With respect to IE8’s lackluster performance, Swenson remarked, “Microsoft isn't rewriting IE from scratch. They're taking an existing code base and modifying it. Thus, it's sort of like turning a big ship around. It takes time. We may need another beta or two.”

He observed that, as a whole, most Web developers are pleased with the strides Microsoft has made towards standards support, but noted that the browser was “not quite there yet” and is likely to be improved.


Related Search Term(s): Acid3, W3C, WaSP


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