Microsoft Snubs Standards with IE8 — Fails Acid3 Test

ChannelWeb ^ | March 20, 2009 | Ed Moltzen

[Swordmaker]

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 has now been available, downloaded, installed and tested around the world and, so far, the reviews have been OK if not mixed. But a mini-storm could be brewing on the horizon. When IE 8 dropped on Thursday, many in the development community rushed to download it, install it and try it out on the Acid 3 Test, developed by The Web Standards Project. All over the world, the score was turning up the same for almost everyone. Out of a possible score of 100, IE 8 rang up 20. It failed the test and failed it badly.

What's the early reaction to IE8's performance on Acid3? Well, on Twitter, there's this:

Ugh! Activating that ActiveX control did nothing. IE8 is still 20/100 on Acid3. What a waste.

Or this:

Acid3 test FAIL in Internet Explorer 8. Actually crashed the browser.

Or this:

I did the acid3 test on my wife's phone with 2.2 and got 74/100.

Or this:

So IE8 scores 20/100 on the Acid3 test. The next 8 years should be fun trying to work around the usual IE incompatibilities... :/

Is this all just a bunch of developer psychodrama?

Consider this: Developers cast a vote every day for the technology that will ultimately win out in the marketplace - - the technology that can more than most help them to be successful. Standards help them to be successful. And while IE 8 is scoring 20 out of 100 on the Acid 3 standards test, a company down the coast, in Cupertino, Calif., did just a tad better. Apple's Safari 4 browser scores 100 on Acid 3. They also have a little product called the iPhone that uses Safari, that's enjoying some success.

In and of itself, standards compliance for free software like a browser won't determine the king of the marketplace. But Microsoft is losing market share on the desktop, and its desktop business actually shrunk during its most recent quarter. Right now it could use all the friends it can get. And in a community critical to the technology industry, its longtime rival Apple now has a big advantage.

[antiRepublicrat]

Hell the newest Safari 3.3.3 or whatever the Windows version is, talk about bloatware. The package is like 104MBs

Safari for Windows has to bring with it everything it needs to work. IE8 uses already-installed Windows libraries. Notice the download size gets bigger as you go from Vista to XP, as it has to bring more functionality with it that is not built into the OS. That said, Safari 3.2.2 for Windows is 19 MB while IE8 for XP is 16 MB, not as much of a difference as you stated. IE8 64-bit for XP is 32 MB, a bit more than Safari 4 for 64-bit Mac.

Worse yet is Apple is slick with the try to trick you into installing iTunes or the Iupdater BS.

It reminds me of Microsoft constantly trying to get you to install Silverlight. I don't like it either.

[antiRepublicrat]

but then fail to mention the hackers convention where they hacked it fairly quickly.

"Quickly" is irrelevant when you spend months finding a vulnerability and crafting an exploit, and then just unleash it at the competition.

[Blue Highway]

I agree that Silverlight crap is nonsense. Same difference with the Apple reminders though.

[Blue Highway]

I’m downloading the Safari 4 beta for Windows again right now. For some reason it is now only saying it is 25.5MB. I could have sworn the other day it was 104MB!!!

[Swordmaker]

What did previous versions of IE score?

I'm not sure. I heard it was around 12. Anyone still running IE7 want to check it?

Acid3 Test

It should look like this when finished:

[Windflier]

Firefox was a re-write, based on the design of Netscape.

Thanks. I knew the truth was somewhere in that ballpark.

[dayglored]

My IE7 on XP ran Acid3 and it looked like this:

Firefox 3 on both Windows and Mac OSX scored 71, and was missing the colors on the blocks.

Safari scored 100 and looked correct.

[Swordmaker]

My IE7 on XP ran Acid3 and it looked like this:

Transporter Technician, shocked: "Uh, Captain Kirk, I don't think it was supposed to come out of the transporter inside out!"

Spock: "It's dead, Jim."

[dayglored]

>> Firefox was a re-write, based on the design of Netscape.

> Thanks. I knew the truth was somewhere in that ballpark.

The old Netscape "Suite" (Navigator browser, Email, and Composer HTML editor) had gotten way too bloated and slow, and had gotten stomped into the ground by IE in the late-80's browser wars.

So some bright kid decided to write Firefox as the browser part only, make it small and quick, but keep the basic Netscape look-and-feel, and compete with IE now that Netscape had long lost that battle. The idea would be to make it open-source, cross-platform, portable, and cool.

Of course, it grew, including some of its own bloat, but it's stayed pretty true to the original notion.

The original Suite survives as the Mozilla SeaMonkey project, and even though my browser is Firefox and my email is Thunderbird, I have SeaMonkey around to this day, for the Composer HTML editor.

[dayglored]

No kidding. I admit, I was pretty shocked. I looked for any things I had done to my settings that might have screwed it, but nope, that seems to be how it comes out regardless.

Holy Mish-Mash, Batman!

[Windflier]

So some bright kid decided to write Firefox as the browser part only, make it small and quick, but keep the basic Netscape look-and-feel, and compete with IE now that Netscape had long lost that battle.

Gotta love that "bright kid", whoever he is.

I first became aware of Firefox through a very computer literate friend (a computing guru/savant, actually) maybe five or six years ago. He wouldn't leave me alone until I dumped IE for Firefox.

After using it for only a short time, I was highly impressed with how superior it was to IE. I've never looked back, and have converted every IE user I know.

Once in a while, I have to open IE for some MS-only application. I always close it as soon as I'm done, and re-open Firefox. IE just can't hold a candle to Firefox for user friendliness. I also avoid IE because of its well-known vulnerabilities to malware.

[dayglored]

> Gotta love that "bright kid", whoever he is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Hyatt

Ross is about 23 years old now; he was in his teens when he started Firefox. I usually see Ross given primary credit, but both contributed.

[razorboy]

Depends on what the goal of the dev team was. Sure if they were looking to be good followers of an independent standard then that’s what it “should” look like. But MS has never had that goal, they want to own the default standards by having the product most people use with slight compatibility problems with competing products. So theirs “should” look like it does. MS isn’t about playing well with others.

[Windflier]

Ross is about 23 years old now; he was in his teens when he started Firefox.

Unbelievable. A teenager outdid the engineering of Microsoft, a major corporation. Brilliant.

[amchugh]

You’ve convinced me to try IE8. I have been using Chrome, which is surprisingly snappy.

[dayglored]

> A teenager outdid the engineering of Microsoft, a major corporation. Brilliant.

Indeed. Like a hot-rod motorboat skipping circles around a lumbering cruise ship. And I'll bet you can count the number of hours he slept during that time on a few fingers at most.

The individual software engineers at Microsoft are very good, often brilliant themselves. But the corporate culture and inertia are deadly to real innovation. Which explains why Microsoft has always had to acquire or steal it, rather than develop it internally. The things they did entirely internally are notably poor, such as Microsoft Bob.

Of course, there was some nepotism involved in Bob, too....