Opera is a very capable browser, despite its small market share. Probably the fact that, for a pretty long time, it was a commercial product, contributed to this, but I don't care about the market share this browser has. All I am interested in is the fact that it uses its own rendering engine, and the fact that some sites have problems displaying on this is not because Opera doesn't comply with standards, but because those sites were "built for IE". Now, let's see how well does Opera comply with the standards...


As you can see above, the score in Acid3 is pretty high, when looking back at Internet Explorer. It seems Opera 9.50 Beta has a score that's even better, but I won't get into it now. I didn't try that version yet, because I really want to be shocked by how good is going to be the next Opera version, without going through any Beta until the final version is released!


At last, it should be noted that Opera has been passing the Acid2 test since version 9.0, released on the 20th of June, 2006. Above, you can see the Acid2 page as displayed by my Opera 9.25 browser...

These being said, prepare to face Mozilla's rendering engine tomorrow, in the last episode of this short article series about the main layout engines and their compatibility with existing Web standards...

Internet Explorer is a pretty old browser, but it seems Microsoft didn't care much about making it compliant with standards. In fact, this lead to a lot of sites being designed to work with IE, but having a lot of problems with other browsers, which have better compatibility with the standards. Well, that's life, and from what I've heard, Internet Exporer 8 won't be perfect either...

Today, we're testing IE 7, as well as some browsers based on it. First, "enjoy" what I got in my Internet Explorer, when loading the Acid2 test!


Acid3 delivered also a pretty bad result, with a score of only 12/100, and a page rendered as you can see below...


After performing these tests for the first time, a few weeks ago, I wondered if it is possible that any browser based on Microsoft's rendering engine could do better, and I wasn't quite surprised to see that everything is exactly the same.


Above, you can see the result I got for Acid3 with Avant. No change, and exactly the same happened with AcooBrowser or Maxthon(see the image below).


These being said and done, prepare for tomorrow, when we'll meet to check out Opera... one down, two to go!

There are a a lot of talks about the Web browsers available on the market and their compatibility with Web standards, and after reading various articles related to this subject, I decided to run the Acid2 test on my own computer and see if my results match those obtained by others. I will only use final versions of various browsers, but we'll talk about this a bit later. First, let's take a look at the Acid2 test, shall we?


Published and promoted by the Web Standards Project, Acid2 is a test suite that checks how well browsers and authoring tools render web pages. Released back in April, 2005, Acid2 checks the compliance of the browser or authoring program used to view its page with the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specs.

Acid2 tests the following standards:
- Alpha transparency on PNG images
- The object element
- Absolute, relative and fixed positioning using CSS
- The CSS box model
- CSS tables
- CSS margins
- CSS generated content
- CSS parsing – Acid2 includes a number of illegal CSS statements to test error handling
- Paint order
- CSS line heights
- Hovering effects

In the next 3 days, we'll check a bunch of browsers based on the most widely used layout engines, and the scores they achieve in this test, as well as the results they manage to pull out in Acid3, currently under development, especially related to testing DOM and JavaScript capabilities...

Basically, we'll talk about Microsoft's Trident rendering engine, used in Internet Explorer, Opera's Presto, and Mozilla's Gecko, so get ready, because this was only the warmup!

Just as a hint, if you want to make it easier to grab each of the 3 next articles remaining to be published in this "Acid Test Series", just remember to subscribe to our RSS by email, and you'll get them as soon as they popup on the site!