Internet Explorer 8 Beta Fails The Acid2 and Acid3 Test
Microsoft just did us all a favour and released the beta 1 version of the much talked about and hyped browser - Internet Explorer 8. They claim to have included many new features, such as Activities, and Webslices, both of which look completely useless at the moment. Other new features include a favorites toolbar, automatic crash recovery,and an ‘improved’ phishing filter. Most of the popular browsers out there (Firefox, Opera) already contain these features and are thousands of times more flexible and customisable than the new IE8.
The really cool part is yet to come. Microsoft’s development team worked their asses off to make IE8 pass the Acid2 test. Hours after the release of the IE8 beta, The Web Standards Project announced the release of Acid3 test. And of course IE8 is nowhere near to passing the test.
Moreover, even though Microsoft said in a press release that IE8 will pass the Acid2 test, it doesn’t. It clearly fails even the Acid2 test.
The sad thing is that Microsoft was working towards passing a particular test, rather than complying to standards. If they had kept in mind the HTML/CSS standards set by the W3C during the development, IE8 would pass all tests by default. If Konqueror can do it, why can’t IE8?
And here I was trying to install IE8 beta on my PCLinuxOS system on Wine :p .
Opera 9.25 scored a 46/100, Firefox 3 Beta 2 scores a 56/100 and Konqueror 3.5.8 crashed all the 3 times I tried to open the test on it.The initial message was that JavaScript was unavailable, after which the score started increasing, and the browser crashed as soon as the count reached to 1/100.
UPDATE 1 : A Microsoft Developer tries to explain why exactly IE8 may not pass the Acid3 Test.
UPDATE 2 : Screens from Opera 9.5 Beta 1 And Firefox 3 Beta 4.
If you liked this post, or found it useful, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email. Or maybe you'd like to know what I'm doing, by looking at my Jaiku badge. But I don't think you would be dumb enough to waste your time and have a look at what randomness I post on Twitter.
Singh on 
Bidyut on 
abhimanyu kumar on 
Nick on 
March 6th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Microsoft is Microsoft. Why follow standards when you can set your own? Meanwhile us Linux users suffer.
By the way, try using the version of Konqueror that comes with KDE4 (must be 4.something, I guess). That one uses WebKit, supposedly one of the most standards compliant rendering engine out there. Or install Safari on Windows and take the test.
Firefox 3 Beta 3 gets 58/100. Ugh. Opera 46/100. Ugh-er.
March 6th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
“Moreover, even though Microsoft said in a press release that IE8 will pass the Acid2 test, it doesn’t. It clearly fails even the Acid2 test.”
Huh? What are you talking about? IE8 Beta 1 passes Acid2. Are you perhaps running the Acid2 test off of http://acid2.acidtests.org/ , instead of the correct URL, http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html ? The former site has an error in the HTML that causes the test to fail. Microsoft discusses it here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/05/why-isn-t-ie8-passing-acid2.aspx
March 6th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
@Warren
But if it’s failing — for whatever reason, cross-domain or not — you should fallback. Hence the current behaviour is still a bug.
(BTW why would it be a cross-domain problem? This should be exactly the same as an iframe, which can cross domains fine.)
It’s a comment posted on the MSDN blog you linked to.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:53 am
[...] 1 earlier this week. Opera 9.5 Beta 1 (Kestrel) was released a month ago. I recently blogged about how these browsers fared in the recently released Acid3 [...]
March 27th, 2008 at 3:15 am
[...] 4, which impressed me a lot with its speed and responsiveness. Then came in the Acid3 test, where Firefox 3 Beta 4 passed 7 more tests as compared to Opera 9.5 Beta. This made me determined to drop Opera as my mainstream browser and shift to Firefox 3 as soon as a [...]