Webreakstuff's blog on design, development and strategy. Click here to subscribe.

The browser wars redux

Fred Oliveira on March 27, 2008

Yesterday Opera announced 100% compatibility with the Acid3 test on a private build. Followed suit by WebKit (you may call it Safari) that announced 100% compatibility available on nightly public builds. Rob Sayre from Mozilla calls Acid3 “basically worthless.” But regardless of who hit it first, or whether it is relevant, yesterday the race was clearly on.

We need these small bursts of innovation to keep moving browser technology forward. It is interesting to see how Opera maintains their status of trying to hit these milestones first, and how Safari is keeping up better than other browsers (like Firefox) do. It is important to mention that IE8 is supposed to come packing with standards support as well, as announced at MIX08 earlier this month. Exciting!


Joe Clark

Relying on smart quotes and mistakenly typing a period outside a closing quotation mark left you with this: “basically worthless“. What is this, Swedish?

Fred Oliveira

Yup, Joe. It was an attempt at swedish. I stand corrected.

Tom L

Re: Above comments…

Ouch!

Peter Ellis

If Microsofts new IE 8 does follow standards it will be a huge relief but… how to we help the masses out there that are still stuck on IE 5?

Pedro Machado Santa

Although IE8 comes - at last - with full Acid2 standard support, it still has to go beyond the Acid3 mark. Same applies for Mozilla.

(PS: After checking the Acid3 test and the average performances for the browsers a couple weeks ago, I had the impression that was a long road before any Acid3 success appeared. Apparently, not true.)

Something to say?