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The browser war, part2
June 20, 2008, 12:25 pm
Filed under: Software Engineering | Tags: , , , , ,

Got a little time over and nothing to do so I thought I should get back to the browser issue. Time for a little comparison, as I’m on a mac atm I didn’t bother getting IE, so the comparison is between Opera, Safari and Firefox. So what is the comparison about? How well they follow the standards, and to do that I used the acid test suite. And here are my findings:

Opera (Presto)
I used the latest version I could find, that is 9.51 build 4877 this is how it scored

Acid 1:
Pass

Acid 2:
Pass

Acid 3:
Fail (83/100)

Comment: I know that there are Opera builds for Linux and Windows that passes the acid 3 test but this test was done on OS X. However a score of 83 is good.

Safari (WebKit)
Also the latest version I could find, which is Version 4 Developer Preview (5526.11.2)

Acid 1:
Pass

Acid 2:
Pass

Acid 3:
Fail (97/100)

Comment: Also here there are builds of Safari that passes acid 3, but apparently not this one even though it’s really close. Another comment that isn’t really related to the test, but I found this build a little bit flaky as I managed to crash it twice since yesterday.

Firefox (Gecko)
Same here, the latest version, Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1pre) Gecko/2008062004 GranParadiso/3.0.1pre

Acid 1:
Pass

Acid 2:
Pass

Acid 3:
Fail (70/100)

Comment: This is very interesting that the latest version I could find (I know there a pre-alpha 3.1 but I couldn’t locate it) performs worse than the stable version (Firefox 3 scored 71/100).

So to sum it up, no browser is there yet when I comes to complete support for web-standards when using OS X. Safari and Opera are getting there, and they’ve shown that they can do it. What this means for the ordinary user, probably nothing for now. But it’s really good that they, the makers of the browsers, are striving to standardize the web to make it easier for everybody.


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