The HandsomeWeb Blog

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 this week.  It is faster and less buggy than the beta and release candidates I tried out. More important to me than all the added features and speed is this is the first Internet Explorer version to pass the acid 2 test.  The acid 2 test is an effort by web standards proponents to have all web browsers follow the same standards when rendering a web page.  Internet Explorer lags behind its competitors, but at least it is in the race now.

Here is an example  of non-standards and the problems it causes:

IE 5 had the considered the border and padding to be on the inside of a box, where the standard was it should be considered outside the box.  So, if I define a box as 100px with a 5 pixel margin, a 1 pixel border, and a 5 pixel border, it will take up 122 pixels in most browsers but only 110 pixels in IE 5 (then another bug would add up to three pixels if it were to close to another box.  Since most users were on IE, this problem had to be accomodated with hacks in the style sheet or avoiding borders and padding altogether.

The Acid2 Test was designed to check browsers for compatibility to all styling standards, and IE has always been behind, but it past the Acid2 test with version 8.  But now it is time to meet the Acid3 test.  Here are the scores (out of 100) that my browsers show:

Firefox 3.0.7 scores 71

Internet Explorer 8 scores 20

Chrome 1.0.154.48 scores 79

Opera 9.64 scores 85

Safari 4 (beta) scores 100

Opera has an unreleased version that is also reaching 100, so IE has a long way to go.  But 0.1% (1 out 1,000) visitors using versions below six.  Most of these are 5.5, which was only for Mac.  Why would anyone on a Mac use IE?