It has been a little while since I have taken a look to see what Firefox 3 (codenamed Gran Paradiso and also known as Minefield) is up to. I didn’t expect it to be much different than Firefox 2 but there were a few features, such as Places, that had gotten pushed back for the release of Firefox 3. In a matter of a few minutes I had the latest nightly build up and running.
I was shocked to see essentially no difference between version 2 and version 3. You may ask yourself “what about the Places bookmark system?” That has actually been pulled out of Firefox 3 for the time being because they just implemented the new theme. For that reason they removed Places until they could get it adjusted to match the rest of Firefox.
As far as the Acid 2 web standard compliance goes it looks like it gets a little better with Firefox 3. Hey, at least the face has eyes now!
I’ll probably be making the switch over to Firefox 3 pre-Alpha about a month after Firefox 2 gets released (I need to have some stability in my life, and a month’s worth should be enough 
). I love testing new browsers mostly for the sheer excitement. I’ve been using Firefox 2 since around January as my primary browser and there were a few bumps along the way but it was always my default browser.
I’d actually never seen that acid test before. Is there any browser that gets it 100% correct?
It’s odd that we’ve all been counting down the time to FF2 release yet within a month you’ll be on FF3. At least Mozilla plan ahead, IE8 will take a long time and they could hopefully steal some of Opera’s thunder.
I believe Opera 9 passes the Acid 2 test 100%, or at least I know it did at one point but I don’t know if they changed something since then. That is why everyone gives Google such a hard time for not working with Opera because it is the most standards compliant browser.
I think it is a lot of fun to test out new browsers but there are always a few nightly versions that I have problems with so I go back to a previous nightly until they resolve the issues. This happened twice with Firefox 2 for me and went on for around a week where it would crash every few minutes.
Safari on the Mac, also passed the acid 2 test. For more information about the acid 2 test, go here [en.wikipedia.org]
Thanks for pointing to that site. It is really interesting and makes you wonder what makes it so hard for all browsers to past the test.
First off, it is called Minefield for a reason, I wouldn’t recommend it even experimentally until an alpha. However, there have been many things already put in 3 since it has been developed alongside 2 – mainly more experimental features that they need more time to work on and test before they are released. A lot of these things have been worked on in various Sandboxes for the time being (like the reflow branch, which is a rewrite of the layout engine that not only passed the acid 2, and has for some time, but does everything oh so right!). On the other hand, many things have already landed on the trunk including more memory leak fixes than the 2 release has, more performance improvements, and most interestingly, a use of the Cairo rendering backend.
Using Cairo has numerous benefits, including faster rendering, hardware accelerated rendering, elimination of the need for Mozilla developers to work on a renderer, easy implementation of things like antialiasing CSS rounded corners (they are so ugly in 1.5!), and using Cocoa on Macs (very recent addition).
There are many other things landed, but these are just some I remember off the top of my head that seemed interesting.
CSS positioning is hard enough as it is, but adding ‘reflow’ makes it even harder. Basically, reflow is what lets you view a page as various components load so you aren’t bored – it reflows the layout on the fly.
Sidenote: FF3 will have the Gecko 1.9 engine, which basically means Javascript 2, acid2 compliance, tons more CSS3 support, more SVG support, and the usual increase in standards compliance.
**Buzzer** ..Wrong!
Minefield is the name for the Trunk itself where Firefox 3.0 is currently being developed on and not Firefox 3.0 as for 3.0 it is or will be Gran Paradiso when branched. The Trunk has been labeled Minefield/3.0a1 since back in mid-April about (bumped from Firefox/1.6a as people thought the 1.6 Trunk was the next major release at time).
[wiki.mozilla.org]
[wiki.mozilla.org]
I confirm, latest Opera version (9.02) passes the Acid2 test flawlessly, and 9.01 gave good results too.
Try with Internet Explorer for a laugh…
Here is the Acid2 test’s web page:
[webstandards.org]
There is a screenshot of [flickr.com] but it could be fake, since I can’t find such build. Anybody can find it?
Acid2 test is passed by Opera since some 9.0 developer build. It is also passed by Safari and iCab (Mac OS X), Konqueror (Linux).
Also there is a very interesting(!) article, where Hakon Wium Lie (Opera’s Chief Technology Officer) challenges Microsoft. It is about standard compliance in upcoming IE7, and it was written in March 2005, when Opera was NOT passing Acid2 itself. I recommend to read this, here it is:
[news.com.com] Acid2 challenge to Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html
@natmaster: That is a lot of really interesting information…thanks for sharing!
You are absolutely right…and the bad thing is that I just found out the codename the other day so it was still fresh in my mind.
I have also heard of the Firefox that supposedly passes the Acid 2 test but I am yet to get my hands on a build that does. I pretty frequently check to see if anything has changed on the Acid 2 test for new Firefox builds but the results are normally the same.
Latest reflow branch here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/experimental/reflow-refactor/latest-trunk
Thanks for posting that reflow branch. I started looking for it after you mentioned it and it is pretty sweet. It is nice having a browser pass the Acid 2 test!
IT PASSED ACID2 TEST !!!!!
Natmaster, thanks for that link!!!!!
It’s 6 months out of date now, but I did a comparison of major browser compliance with the Acid2 test; you can see the results here:
[petergasston.co.uk]
I didn’t have access to Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) at the time, but I followed up later:
[petergasston.co.uk]
That reminds me to do a follow-up!
Sorry, those links are:
[petergasston.co.uk]
[petergasston.co.uk]
I like that comparison and if you update it let me know. I would love to check it out!
Reflow branch has actually been passing the test for months now (April to be exact); you can see the first reports of this on the [bugzilla.mozilla.org] entry for the acid2 test. Or at a developer’s [bugzilla.mozilla.org]
OK, but here is another mystery:
Nightly/Latest-trunk and Nightly/Experimental/Reflow-refactor/Latest-trunk have different Gecko engines (one is similar to 1.8.1 and doesn’t pass Acid2, and another do pass Acid2 perfectly).
But both have the same Gecko engine version: 1.9a1. Why??
By time you see a release of Gecko 1.9a1 the reflow branch will have merged with the trunk and they will be one!