Have you ever heard of the Acid test for browsers?

Acid 2 is the worst case senario to test web standards compliance. Looking at the source code, it’s by far one of the most convoluted (yet perfectly web compliant) pages I’ve ever seen. I was digging around the Mozilla ftp site and found a really old version of Firefox, called Phoenix and snagged that as well as Firebird.

Phoenix begot Firebird, and Firebird begot Firefox - the browser we all know and love.

Let’s take a look at the results:

Phoenix 0.1
screenshot-7.png

Firebird 0.6
screenshot-8.png

Firefox 2
screenshot-10.png

Firefox 3 Beta 1
screenshot-9.png

Finally, a browser that passes! It’s only been 5 years since Phoenix was initially released, but well worth the wait.



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9 Comments to “Acid2 Test - Firefox 3 Beta 1 vs Phoenix 0.1, Firebird 0.6 and Firefox 2”

  1. Yuki | November 26th, 2007 at 1:55 am

    Yeah, Firefox 3.0 will give us properly rendered pages (woo!). It’s just a shame that Opera, Konqueror and (not overly surprising) Safari have done this for a while ;)

  2. dootzky | November 26th, 2007 at 7:54 am

    FireFox For Future!! :D

    lot’s of F’s there ;)
    cheers

  3. k00pa | November 26th, 2007 at 9:32 am

    And how long will take that ie survives that test… :D

  4. Steph | November 30th, 2007 at 4:27 am

    Hello, sorry if I’m not at all in this article subject, but I’m a Linux user (Ubuntu 7.10) and I’m desperatly looking for some simple newsgrabbing software, something more consistent that hellanzb and much lighter than Pan, or something. Then Google gave me a result about a Mamba-Reader project wich I think is owned by you, and the only mamba.py file I downloaded from SVN is already very promising ! Are you going to work on it ? To finalize it ? I think your program could have a real success !

  5. Wayne | November 30th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    Steph- I think you’re confused. :)

  6. Chris | December 5th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

    I don’t get a pass in Beta 1. On webstandards.org’s Guide page they describe Row 1 as follows:

    This row is the scalp of the face and it tests fixed positioning, minimum and maximum heights, and minimum and maximum widths. In the markup, the row is represented by a p element which is fixed to the window rather than the scrollable canvas. If the Acid2 page is scrolled, the scalp will stay fixed in place, becoming unstuck from the rest of the face, which will scroll.

    In Fx 3 Beta 1, I can’t scroll the face. Would it be wrong to say this is not a pass?

  7. conner | December 10th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    Holly crap Phoenix, I haven’t heard that name in forever. I remember running that back when I was my 2nd year of college.

  8. Tappy | December 20th, 2007 at 3:42 am

    I’m looking at the acid 2 test in firefox 3 beta 2 and it doesn’t render correctly there is a scroll bar across the middle of the face. I have heard that IE 8 passes the test, but then some people seem to be claiming firefox beta passes which it doesn’t

  9. Tappy | December 20th, 2007 at 3:47 am

    I stand corrected, it’s actually the test was incorrect. some of the files weren’t/aren’t hosted correctly

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