WebKit the first to get 100/100 on Acid3

@16:32 Leave a comment

WebKit has become the first publically available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on the Acid3 test.

This is a big step forward, with other browsers not far behind. Opera employee David Storey announced yesterday that the Opera browser now achieves a 98% score. With Firefox Beta 4 not too far behind with 71%.

It's not all about the 100/100 score though, the animation also needs to render "smoothly", but I think the meaning of "smoothly" is open for interpretation. I imagine we'll start to see a lot more browsers getting 100% over the next few days. Unfortunately I doubt IE will be in that group, but I can always hope.

EDIT : Seems I spoke too soon, Opera is now at 100%.

Tags : internet, css, browsers

Acid3 Test Released

@7:33 Leave a comment

The Acid3 Test has been released by the Web Standards Project.

There's an article on DrunkenFist with screenshots of how the most common browsers render the test. From what I can see not a single one passes with 100/100, but Safari 3 gets pretty close with 87. Of course, Internet Explorer fails miserably, but I'd expect nothing less. Firefox 3 doesn't mess up the layout as much as the others, but still only scores 59/100.

It'll be interesting to see how, and if, popular browsers like Firefox and Opera adjust to be better at handling the standards and whether any of them will be able to get 100/100 anytime soon.

Tags : internet, css, browsers

First Look at IE8 Beta

@1:54 Leave a comment

Microsoft have released the Internet Explorer 8 Beta for XP SP2, Vista and Windows Server 2003. You can download it here.

I'm currently running Linux, so it won't install under wine. But I'll switch over to Windows this weekend and give it a full review. I'm looking forward to seeing if it's any better than IE7.

Microsoft have a list of the new features though. One thing that they've also started to focus on is better AJAX support.

Tags : internet, browser

Hurrah! IE8 to be Standards Compliant by Default

@7:58 Leave a comment

According to a recent post in the IE8 blog, IE8 will be in standards compliant mode by default.

"We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can."

This is a change from the previous thinking whereby web developers would have to explicitly opt-in to make IE8 render in standards mode. Thank God they've changed it to be default. IE8 is shaping up to be a good browser for web developers, let's hope the improvements keep coming and maybe, just maybe, websites won't need to be hacked to render correctly in IE8.

Tags : internet, browsers