Two decades ago, computers and multimedia were two completely different realms, but as computing power available to unleash grew, music and image became a part of any home computer, and I don't want to mention games here, because I have something completely different in mind...


Today, it's absolutely normal to watch movies and listen to your favorite music on your computer, but how many of you still remember those old days when there were only a few media players available, those days before even Windows 95 kicked in, when MP3 files were encoded in very low quality, just so the most powerful processors of the time could be able to decode them? Anyway, this is not going to be a history lesson, because the present is extremely interesting, and that's where I want to arrive - today's best multimedia applications!

Basically, we're going to talk about audio and video players, but if you're going to ask it, I'll test a few CD ripping tools, although some players offer CD ripping features, such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or Jet-Audio, to name the most notorious ones.

While a lot of things come for free in life, software is no exception, but I won't leave aside the commercial applications, if they prove to be worth the price. After all, that's what we all need - best multimedia experience on our computers, and we have soo many choices these days, that organizing them into a top requires a lot of work and research, so please take your time to help, by answering the following questions:

- What's your favorite music/video player?
- When talking about "multimedia software for home" these days, what other categories, apart from audio and video players, would you like to see revealed here? Image viewing and editing, maybe? Internet streaming/TV tools, such as Joost?
- Which features you look for first in a media player/multimedia software? Do you think functionality can overcome a bad user interface?

This is it for now, please drop us your wishes below, and we'll do our best to please you. Let's write some great articles together, shall we?

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Today, we arrive to the final destination of our web compliance mini-series, and the topic is Firefox, or Mozilla's Gecko engine, to be more accurate. Since Mozilla or Firefox don't need any additional presentation, let's get right into battle, so we can draw the conclusions at the end, shall we?


As you can see above, Firefox failed the old Acid2 test, to my amazement. On this field, it seems Opera is the leader, being the only browser in my little test to pass this old HTML/CSS compliance test!

Just as a side note, be aware that Safari 2.02 also managed to pass this test, being also the first one to do that, back on the 31st of October, 2005. I didn't include the Windows version in my tests, simply because its market share is tiny at this time, and I didn't have a Mac at my disposal to try the one built for Mac OS X...


Next, in the Acid3 test, Mozilla's Gecko engine got a slightly better result than Opera, reaching 50/100. Anyway, there's still a looong way until full compliance is reached...

Testing with other browsers that use the Gecko engine, such as Flock or K-Ninja, didn't bring any surprises, because the results were exactly the same as those in Firefox, so let's move on and draw the conclusions, shall we?

When talking about the older Acid2 test, only Opera managed to display the correct image. Internet Explorer 7 and browsers that use its rendering engine displayed simply a mess, while Firefox 2 got almost there, but didn't manage to pull it off and display an accurate test image.

At last, the Acid3 test was a very tough one for all three main rendering engines that rule the browsers market, the final score being 12(Trident/Internet Explorer) - 46(Presto/Opera) - 50(Gecko/Firefox), and since Trident is only compatible with Windows, at this time, while Presto and Gecko are working well on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD and Unix, Internet Explorer may just go down the drain, if Microsoft doesn't do something about it!

Finally, just remember to subscribe to our RSS feed, because we'll have such series in the future too, so best way to find out about them in time is to receive our news in your email. Of course, you can be sure we won't give away your address to any third parties, or send you any spam messages!

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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...

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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!

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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!

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