That whole situation with ACID 3 is very unclear to me. That 'smooth animation' requirement makes thing so complected. For example I can run Safari 4 beta on a very slow machine and technically it won;t pass the test. Or I could find a very fast computer and run Opera 10 alpha to pass it. So...
I would just list a chain of events. But I will say explicitly about browsers & rendering engines and scoring 100/100 & 'fully pass'
Last spring:
1. Opera announced that they have scored 100/100 on some internal build.
2. They released a build on labs.opera.com
3. WebKit team found an error in one of the tests and it was changed. Opera's build score went down to 99/100
4. WebKit released a public build
During the summer:
5. WebKit released the first build to 'fully pass' the test (100/100 + smooth animation).
Last December:
6. Opera released 10 alpha - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to score 100/100 (as opposed to a rendering engine)
This February:
7. Apple released Safari 4 beta - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to fully pass ACID 3 (100/100 + smooth animation)
As I see both companies can advertise their achievement:
Opera 10 alpha - the first browser to score 100/100 on ACID 3
Safari 4 beta - the first browser to fully pass ACID 3
The thing is that both claims are True! :)
But that doesn't mean that other Apple or Opera claims are legitimate. As for browser popularity it depends from country to country especially in Opera case. There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.
> There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.
I'm having a hard time believing this. Any stats?
> For example I can run Safari 4 beta on a very slow machine and technically it won;t pass the test.
Hixie, who's pretty much the guy behind the whole test-suite and the authority on Acid 3, said that the reference machine is MacBook Pro. So, no, you couldn't run it on a slow machine and say it doesn't pass, because that's not the machine it has to pass on. :)
As a bottom line: worldwide market share doesn't mean anything. Even if you don't support some browser with a 0.1% share then you stop supporting millions of people and leave them upset.
But you shouldn't think about smaller browsers. Pick a good tools like jQuery (which replaced all browser sniffing code with feature detection) and provide a fallback (like GMail basic or Y!Mail Classic) and you should be fine :)
And don't leave IE 8 f*cked up: never use 'if IE' conditional comments. Check for a specific versions instead like 'if lte IE 7'. Give them a chance.
> the reference machine is MacBook Pro
Didn't know that, sorry. As I said I seems just too complicated to me :)
But Chrome uses WebKit and Apple contributors were the ones who got WebKit to pass Acid 3 first and released a proper build long before Chrome came around. :) So, again, as mentioned before, depends on your criteria. As somebody said, this is usual Apple — agreesive marketing, but some of these are true or partially true, so it's not as bad as that forum post makes it seem.
I would just list a chain of events. But I will say explicitly about browsers & rendering engines and scoring 100/100 & 'fully pass'
Last spring:
1. Opera announced that they have scored 100/100 on some internal build.
2. They released a build on labs.opera.com
3. WebKit team found an error in one of the tests and it was changed. Opera's build score went down to 99/100
4. WebKit released a public build
During the summer:
5. WebKit released the first build to 'fully pass' the test (100/100 + smooth animation).
Last December:
6. Opera released 10 alpha - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to score 100/100 (as opposed to a rendering engine)
This February:
7. Apple released Safari 4 beta - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to fully pass ACID 3 (100/100 + smooth animation)
As I see both companies can advertise their achievement:
Opera 10 alpha - the first browser to score 100/100 on ACID 3
Safari 4 beta - the first browser to fully pass ACID 3
The thing is that both claims are True! :)
But that doesn't mean that other Apple or Opera claims are legitimate. As for browser popularity it depends from country to country especially in Opera case. There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.