Seems that newest release of Safari fails the acid 2 test.

When you run the test, it seems there is no problem, you get the smiley face rendered correctly…

…but if you refresh the page…

Bug report

If you don’t already know…

Firefox 3 Beta 1 now available for download

It’s really aimed at developers and testers.

If you are a developer, then I would suggest looking through this…

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

For those that don’t know, it is actually possible to have more than 1 version of IE running on Windows, basically they are installed as a standalone application. Luckily, someone has done the work for us and created an installer that allows you to select which versions of IE you want to install (not including IE 7, though there is information available if you want that as standalone).

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

Have a read through the article, just follow the simple instructions, or just scroll to the bottom of the article and download the installer. If you are running Vista, then I would suggest reading the whole article, as there are problems. May even want to read through the comments incase there are better solutions for Vista that I am not aware of.

You will notice a few problems when testing in older versions, for example, when clicking on a bookmark, it will show the print dialogue. It’s not a big problem for most, as long as you don’t need to do any print testing (work around for that as well). Those problems relate to IE 6.0, am not sure about the other versions. I did try out IE 3.0 at work, but that just blew up :p

Have fun testing

There’s nothing like a good healthy dose of browser testing

Safari comes with a debug menu, so us Javascript programmers can actually debug our code, only problem is, it’s not enabled by default. Took me a while to work out how to do it on Windows Vista at work, as the folder location has changed compared to XP.

Anyway, here’s how to do it on the Mac, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

Mac

Open up the terminal and type:

Windows XP / Vista

With windows, you will manually need to edit the file called “Preferences.plist”. On XP, you should find that in…

For Vista, it is located in…

Open the file up in a text editor, and add a new key entry…

Make sure you nest it correctly inside the dict tag.

Save it and restart Safari. You should now see the debug menu at the end.

Credits: I take no credit for the above solutions, you can find the answer on many blogs by searching Google, though the Vista information was a little harder to find, so altogether they are :p

If you haven’t been following this, then check it out…

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Safari is now available for windows.

I’ve used Safari at work for testing applications, am not a fan of it myself, but it’s good to see Apple finally doing something for Windows users. Developers now have no excuse if their website doesn’t show correctly in Safari. Basically that is all I will be using it for.

New update for Firefox 2 for those interested.

Release Notes:

• Release Date: March 20, 2007
• Security Update: The following security issues have been fixed (link).
• Website Compatibility: Fixed various web compatibility regressions.
• Earlier Changes: For information about previous changes, please see the Firefox 2.0.0.2 Release Notes

http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.3/releasenotes/

So I decided to install Firefox 2 RC2, and I like it a lot, only that some of my extensions no longer work, which is what I expected. But, one extentsion I really needed was the Web Developer Toolbar, I use it a lot. Because I really needed it, I downloaded the xpi file from the homepage, opened it in winrar, edited the maxVersion value in the install.rdf file, restarted, and w00t, it’s back. Am happy now, lol.

Something i’m looking forward to using in Firefox 2, is the Javascript storage database API , read up on it a few months back, and am quite keen to see what can be done with it. Just need to wait until other vendors add support for it, I think IE has it’s own way of doing persistent storage.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Storage

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/persistence/overview.asp