Those with long memories will remember ABBA. The rest of us may just about recall the good work of the CSS Samurai when they launched the Acid Test back in 1997 and challenged makers of browsers world-over to improve their support for CSS 1.
Well, dammit, we’re at it again. No, not the Swedish song and dance routines, the bit about the browsers. Acid2 is a brand new test designed to push the limits of HTML, CSS, and PNG support in browsers and authoring tools. By testing against Acid2, flaws in support for common web standards are quickly and easily exposed.
Read the official press release for the full skinny. I promise it has no mention of camptastic European supergroups.
Now for the stuff I haven’t copied verbatim from my earlier post on the BUZZ blog. There’s lots of reasons why I like Apple as a company (as well as things I disagree with), but you really have to take your hat off to Safari developer Dave Hyatt. He’s already fixed a bunch of bugs in Safari’s rendering. My money is on him being first past the post with an accurate rendering. Apple tend to release fairly frequent updates to Safari too, so once it’s fixed we could have it in our hand pretty quickly.
Compare and contrast to Microsoft. I understand that Microsoft are at least partially on board with this issue – and all credit to them for that – but if you ever needed an example of agile vs. non-agile then you have it right here. They’re like a sodding oil tanker – their turn-around time is in excess of four years. That might be fine for a product like an operating system, but not for a browser.
There are two very different strategies being played out here. Companies like Apple appear to keep themselves light, they can respond quickly to changes and can keep putting out products that the customer wants there and then. The Mozilla Foundation take this approach with their recent products (although not in the past).
Big ol’ companies like Microsoft tend to take a longer view approach. They’ll throw in months or years of development with a promise that the end will knock your socks off. And it might. But in the mean time, you’ve got a lot of dissatisfied customers who may have preferred to be drip fed just a little of the goodness along the way. Particularly for the case of web browsers, this is definitely a ship-early, ship-often market.
Comments
Sorry, I couldn’t resist :-)
Having this kind of customer is vastly different to your bleeding-edge techy users who are willing to look at the source and work out they need to click an invisible div thats shifted 30px to the right of the image it should have been over etc etc.
But, then, you think about the $54 billion they have in the bank, and the way they try to crush open source efforts that might eat into their bottom line, whilst selling software to third world countries that could use Linux instead, and any sympathy rapidly begins to evapourate.
You’re quite right that Microsoft can’t be as agile as Apple or Mozilla, given their massive user base. But that’s still a bad thing, and I still think Microsoft sucks because of it :)
...and it would be very cool if Tiger came with an Acidtest2 friendly Safari. But I hope Apple doesn’t strand Panther users at a Safari version behind as they did with the X.2 folks.
Jesse – WaSP are working closely with Macromedia with the hope that Acid2 will be useful for them too. As Tiger has already gone gold, (and most likely RTM), we’ll not be seeing an Acid2-compliant Safari shipping with Tiger. My hope is for 10.4.1!
Slashdot article
I do agree that they need to update more often… but how often is often enough (or too often)?
Kevin
Absolutely. Hyatt tells everyone which bugs he’s fixed and how.
Microsoft? They hire somebody to tell people how good Internet Explorer is
The difference between the two attitudes is amazing.
In 11 days!
Did y’all make the test a little easy? :)