Recently a couple of links were sent my way that my browser wouldn't render properly. This is particularly irritating to me. I believe a browser should work properly, quickly, and conveniently in that order. Unfortunately my browser of choice at the time (Flock) was not up to the challenge. Sure, it has a ton of cool features that I love but it is not particularly quick and seemed to be falling flat on the proper aspect as well. I decided to have a look by running it through the acid test or acid3test to be more precise.
The Acid tests are part of the Web Standards Project developed to discern a browser's support of html standards, particularly DOM and Javascript. By going to http://acid3.acidtests.org/ you can see how your browser rates. I did this with the Mac version of Flock and scored a 70. I didn't know how good or bad that was but I wasn't terribly encouraged so I ran a couple of others through the mill. Firefox, unsurprisingly did little better with a 72. I say unsurprisingly because Flock is built from Firefox. Next I tried Opera 9. It did much better with an 85. Finally I tried Safari and scored a perfect 100. Safari is very fast and apparently supports html standards very well. It does fall short on a few of the features that I have grown accustomed to, though so I decided to see if I could fix that. I found keywurl which restores my keyword search functionality I grew to love in Flock and Firefox. Other plug-ins allowed me to try to replicate Firefox's "Awesome Bar". Oddly, the next time I hit the acid3 site, my score had dropped to 99. After uninstalling the other plug-ins (keywurl did not have an impact), I made it back to 100. This might explain the disparity between Flock and Firefox given that Flock uses the same engine but is a very heavily "plugged-in" version of Firefox.
So I guess the lesson here is that you can't have it all. Speed, compatibility, and functionality are truly warring with each other and it looks like you are going to have to take your pick. Oh and in case you were wondering. Internet Explorer 7 on Windows scored a 5 on the Acid3 Test. No, not 50 but FIVE! IE8 reportedly is much better with a score of 20. That is particularly disappointing considering all of the things Internet Explorer can't do and it isn't even very fast.
1 comment:
Thank you; this is really great information! Lately, I use different browsers for different functions, although I have yet to use Safari extensively. You've certainly provided convincing evidence that I should give it more time.
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