Opera scores 100 on the acid3 test yet some sites won't work properly on it. It doesn't matter if the browser is standard compliant. If its popular enough web designers will go out of their way to accomodate it.
Nope, Opera just renders some things differently to the WebKit (Safari/Chrome/Konqueror)/Mozilla engine browsers. I've certainly noticed a lot of Opera specific bugs, and unlike IE, you can't use CSS hacks to fix some of them (save for annoying user agent detection).
The sandboxing feature is way overrated. I can count the number of times my browser has crashed due to a tab failing on my hands. And crash recovery from Firefox isn't bad at all since it restores your tab state. If Chrome didn't have so many weird issues with page loading and had a better extension model I would probably be using it and the only reason for that is it starts up faster. Chrome still has major issues rendering Flash properly and it seems their request timeouts are tuned down too low.
No one goes out of their way to prevent a site to work with a browser. Commercial web designers have to test their website on all browsers in the market (although I think the likes of IE 5.5 and Netscape are finally being ignored). People who design their own websites usually have some sort of opinion of either IE, Firefox and Opera and don't go out of their way to make the site render properly in one or more of those browsers. I, for example, only test my personal website designs out on Firefox. If it doesn't work on IE and Opera, too bad. But I don't go out of my way to not make it work on IE and Opera.
Changing the user agent won't do anything except ignore the fixes that are done in a browser-specific model. The rendering engine is still the same of the actual browser.
It's not at all like saying that. No one is pushing for the HTML, XHTML, CSS or any of the web standards to be modified to make IE's rendering engine standards-compliant. What AbBh was saying is that if enough people use a non-standards compliant browser and you have a commercial application, it makes more sense to step down from your moral high ground and ensure your site can be rendered by that browser.also the second one is like saying if turbo c is popular enough the c standard will be revised to make it compatible
This is not as relevant as you might think; while acid2 was a reaction to some very obvious flaws in IE, acid3 is less focused.
No. But IE9's focus on standards compliance is better targeted towards meeting the important things, rather than the focus by the other browsers on passing the Acid tests, while still having great big holes in their rendering engine.
IE8 is a good browser. IE7 had a lot of rendering issues, but IE8 gets away from that. All you miss is some of the newer CSS3 and HTML5 stuff. When designing the new look PlanetCricket I didn't need to make a single IE8 hack, IE7 and 6 needed them (and I only went to the effort of making IE6 render acceptably, not trying to make it look the same). As for buggy, I can't think of any evidence for that, and I've not once noticed a browser being 'slow' - stop watched pageload tests make no difference in the real world - the only time a browser is any faster is when there's a pile of excessive javascript - and it slows down in all browsers with some better than others.
IE9's up to the mid 80s now.
I certainly don't agree with that either. It is as good in many crucial ways, better than the others in some and worse in others.
So again, where is the contradiction. I certainly never said IE is the best browser, so what are you on about?
