Unlimited Jargon

The Acid Test (2)

Find an anagram of Microsoft's Internet Explorer

I believe strongly in web standards. IE and Netscape initially lacked standards and websites commonly had to use a massive IF statement for each browser. Then for a time IE became the standard. Now however with several other good browsers around (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and so on) standards have really made a comeback.

More recently some clever people at webstandards.org have created a test of new standards which all browsers should be able to handle. You can try it out at http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html

You may be surprised to learn that Firefox does not pass (I certainly was!). Normally the Mozilla foundation is very keen on supporting web standards, but they have not yet released any version which works (Support should be arriving in Firefox 3). http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/ documents the progress of each of the main browsers in meeting the requirements and gives more information about the test overall.

If you want to see it working, I recommend using Opera 9. Without the adverts in the interface (which occurred in version 7 and earlier) and with all the advanced features it posses it really is starting to compete with Firefox and its cross-platform too. Give it a try.

In any event compared to IE7, both browsers are brilliant and I strongly discourage IE usage until Microsoft decides to start investing some real energy into making a secure, functional and compatible browser.


That was a hard one: Complexities front ten errors. See Anagramsite.com for more anagrams.

Labels: Technology

posted by Caesar on Thursday, August 03, 2006