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The Moz Cause

Being an avid slashdot reader, I read a lot of stories that are mostly based off fact. Then again, some are based off of total trash. I have witnessed the lack of informational prowess by story writers, but in this latest case, I don’t know where I should stand. The article in question is about the Acid3 test that browsers are benchmarked on. According to this story, Safari scores 90% and my favorite browser of all (Firefox) scores a mediocre 69%. This tells me one of two things, either the story is a complete joke or it’s a bold statement about Firefox’s web compliance. I have use Safari and I am not very impressed. It has many flaws that hamper my browsing experience (such as tables not being aligned correctly, flash issues, colors, etc). But those are all small things and if this Acid3 test is the industry “standard”, then I say its not much of one. I believe it might be favoring the Safari side or that it was built off standards that Safari developers pushed forth. In essence, a standard is a standard is a standard and should be taken with a grain of salt when trusting it’s verdict.

This entry was posted on March 9, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “The Moz Cause”

  1. Anonymous Coward says:
    March 10, 2008 at 12:14 am

    The version of Safari that scored 90% was the nightly build (as was the top version of Firefox). Safari 3 scored 39% and was indeed handily outscored by Firefox 2 (52%).

    Also, the Acid Tests aren’t really standards — the W3C standards are the standards. The acid tests are just… well, tests. They stress test the browser in odd and difficult rendering jobs, and give developers an idea of where the problems in their render engine are. Like any test, though, it can be a bit artificial, and it doesn’t test everything; instead it tries to test the subset of the cases that people care the most about. Developers could certainly push up their Acid3 scores at the cost of putting energy elsewhere, if they so desired, so as you indicate, it’s really just a guideline. But it’s the best we’ve got.

  2. Kriss says:
    March 10, 2008 at 12:53 am

    Actually, if you look a bit closer, it’ll tell you some more. Firefox release beats Safari 3 release, while Safari nightlies beat Firefox nightlies. All in all, the Safari chaps seem to be fixing the issues (at a good rate at that) - the Firefox maintainers do it as well, obviously, looking at progress of nightlies vs. release/beta/whatnot.

  3. Mazhar says:
    March 10, 2008 at 12:56 am

    Well theres a reason given on the safari blog (http://webkit.org/blog/158/the-acid-3-test/)

  4. Andre Guibert de Bruet says:
    March 10, 2008 at 2:45 am

    Though I am not much of a Safari fan myself, I will say that my browser of choice, Firefox, isn’t exactly standards-compliant. There are literally tens of thousands of feature nuances to check for, and browser developers have to spend a considerable amount of time chasing the ones that are used in benchmarks to “make the grade”. There were a couple of interviews of the Safari developers that were posted online about 18 months ago, that stated that Apple is striving for 100% Acid compliance (Acid 2 was the suite they were trying to comply to at the time). Based on the fact that Mozilla is largely developed by volunteers that do not spend most of their working hours working on Gecko, I am impressed by how well it has fared compared to the other browsers in the list. My own testing has Internet Explorer 7 (7.0.6000.16609) running on Vista Ultimate x64 chiming in at 5/100 (Five out of one hundred).

    Once again, there is more to a browser than strict Acid compliance. Things like look and feel, responsiveness and ease-of-configuration matter a whole lot to the average user than passing arcane Javascript and CSS-based tests.

  5. n/a says:
    March 10, 2008 at 5:42 am

    Both of them are developing to pass ACID3, Firefox stepped up 10% from its last beta release (beta4pre to beta5pre) and coming up!

  6. Nemo says:
    March 17, 2008 at 8:36 am

    Javascript and CSS code may seem arcane to the average browser user. But when they visit a web site, they expect the page to be rendered in a manner that allows them to access the content as the developer of the page intended. We’ve been browsing for decades through pages whose markup includes specific work-around-code to handle specific browsers which don’t render correctly, render in peculiar manners, or worse, don’t render at all.

    On the web developer side, and the user, attaining a greater level of compliance to a web standard for rendering content only helps make everyone’s browsing experience better. W3C’s Acid test will likely end up being one of many developed for this purpose, and kudos to them for coming up with the idea. It’s working, developers are paying attention, and doing their best to make their browsers compatible… Well, most are ;)

  7. MacRenegade says:
    March 24, 2008 at 9:06 am

    Actually Safari 3.1 (with the normal webkit build) got 74%.

  8. Mark says:
    March 24, 2008 at 9:10 am

    Good comments. I might have been a bit over zealous with my post. Thanks everyone.

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