Thursday, April 14, 2005

Acid2: Safari goes hunting & more browsers

Following up on my previous post on Acid2 rendering in most browsers, David Hyatt has started cramming for this exam and will blog as progress happens:
I started work today on making Safari pass the test, and I thought I'd blog my progress as I fix bugs in the test. This will be a fairly slow process as whole features may have to be added simply to make one row of the test render correctly.
Thanks to several comments in the previous post, I've managed to complete the collection of snapshots:
Here's how the test looks in Omniweb (Mac browser, thanks to Yoji Hirabayashi for this and other screenshots)

This is Netscape 7.2 for Macintosh (image courtesy of Kristen):

And Camino (a Mac native Gecko based browser) 0.8 nightly, not surprisingly, is identical to Firefox-trunk (image also courtesy of Kristen):

This is Safari as it is now (version 1.2 125.12, if those are enough version numbers for you! thanks William Wu)

On Yoji's computer it looks like this:

This is Safari 1.3 (dev version available when the Acid2 test was published, thanks to Kristen)

And here is what Hyatt has managed to do in just a few days: the red background is gone, the top and the mouth are better now. It will be interesting to see how Gecko tries to do the same.

Friday, April 08, 2005

So is YOUR browser ANY good at CSS2?

Seen on the Standblog (fr), the new Acid2 test page for browsers, "written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products". I tend to agree with Tristan that the test doesn't readily tell you what your browser is lacking in support, but then you can read the guide for that.
Here are some screenshots of the test page under different browsers. If you have other browsers, leave a message with a link to the image in the comments. It seems full CSS2 support is not here yet !
Update (2005/04/08 9:40): David Naylor has sent a link to some other screen shots; below (Netscape 6.1, Opera 7.54, and Firefox 1.0+ nightly).
I'm still missing Macintosh-based browsers: Safari, IE/mac, and Camino, though it will probably look like Firefox).

Here is how the test page should look:

These are under Links and Lynx ;-) (click for full size image)...

The different versions of Internet Explorer are pretty broken, but hell, you didn't need this fancy test to know that:
IE 5.01

IE 5.5

IE 6

What is funny though is that IE6 doesn't behave in the same way if it's running in Wine or in Windows 98:

With Konqueror 3.2.3 we're getting more supported features of CSS2: you know that because you can see more stuff from the happy face. Seeing how Konqueror 3.4 is touted as being CSS2.1 compliant, I'd be interested if somebody could post a screenshot !

Update 2005/04/11: Doug Wright has put a screenshot of Konqueror 3.4. Well, full support for CSS2.1 is a bit of an exageration, as it's only marginally better than 3.2.

Opera 8.0 (beta) is also not bad, except for the ugly looking red background (red means broken in the Acid2 test).

Opera 7.54 (courtesy of David Naylor) is only marginally worst than Opera 8.

If you compare Netscape 6.1 below (also courtesy of David Naylor) with the images farther down the page, you will see how Gecko (the rendering engine behind Netscape and Mozilla browsers) has matured in CSS2 support:

Firefox 1.0.2 is also not very far from that, but then it's still not the correct image !

Firefox 1.0+, nightly (ie, Gecko 1.8), image courtesy of David Naylor

We are no longer the knights who say: Ni!

It's official: Mandrakesoft (makers of a very fine linux distribution) has changed name and will now be called Mandriva (pronounced man-DREE-vah according to a post on the mailing-list). Mandrakesotf gives two reasons: the merger with Conectiva and the lawsuit about the "Mandrake the magician" name. This follows shortly after the roadmap for 2005 and the version naming scheme were modified. So the next version (what used to be called Mandrakelinux 10.2) will now be called Mandriva limited Edition 2005.
According to the press release:
After spending weeks balancing pros and cons, Mandrakesoft has decided to change its name!

The name change will apply worldwide to both the company and its products. The management team sees two good reasons for this change:

1. The recent Mandrakesoft - Conectiva merger calls for a new identity that better represents the combination of two key companies and their global presence.

2. The long-winding trademark lawsuit with Hearst Corporation has reached a point where we decided it is more reasonable for us to move forward. By adopting a new name, we eliminate the liability attached to the Mandrakesoft name and we can focus on what is important to us: developing and delivering great technology and solutions to both our customers and our user community.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Arbitrary memory exposure vulnerability

This just in: Secunia has found a bug in Firefox 1.0.2 that allows a JavaScript program to reveal "arbitrary amounts of heap memory". The bug in Bugzilla was filed on the 1st of April (alas, not a fool's day joke), and was fixed on the trunk that same day. So this bug will be fixed for 1.0.3, which should be coming as soon as the final bugs are squashed.

The bug allows any amount of heap memory to be read. The test case given by Secunia showed several interesting strings in my case: visited URLs, information on some extensions I am using, and even the text of this post as I am writing it. I don't know for sure, but it seems very likely that passwords and other sensitive information can be read in this way. The solution: disable JavaScript.

Friday, April 01, 2005

2GB and rich formatting in Gmail

Wow. Hadn't noticed before, but it seems Gmail has increased available space to 2GB (putting it on par with Yahoo! Mail Plus, $19.99). So far I only seem to have 115MB more:
You are currently using 196 MB (18%) of your 1115 MB.
Also new, rich text formatting, similar to what is done in Blogger.
With prefetch, it seems Google is incrementally improving its services, even though recent controversies seem to have eroded its geek-fan-base. We'll see how things go, maybe Don't be evil will stay that way, if not all the time, at least most of the time.