A few months ago I blogged about a browser test that would be created by the CTO of Opera software. This test uses most of the latest web standards, and is designed to help browser developers test their support. Acid2 is now finished and live. The timing couldn’t be better, considering the browser wars are just heating up again. Microsoft is working on IE 7 which is supposed to be released in a couple of months, in beta. But the head of the IE programming group posted to his blog a few months ago, stating that the IE group would only code to the standards when their customers request it. Of course, their customers are dimwits and don’t even know what browser standards are (excuse my bitter rant, this is a pretty big sore spot for me). So we’ll have to see if Microsoft passes the acid test this time.
By the way, I ran the acid test in Firefox, IE, and Opera tonight. IE did a horrible job of rendering the page. Neither Opera nor Firefox rendered it correctly, but they both were a lot more correct looking than IE. However, I wasn’t testing with the latest version of IE 6, because I haven’t installed XP SP 2 (it caused problems with my hardware in the past). If I remember right though, XP SP 2 didn’t make any changes to IE’s rendering engine, it just made security adjustments.
