IE6 and IE7 in between 10 and 20%? I call it “relief”. And I also call it, “not fast enough”.
Still, IE6 being used more than IE7 is a kind of a perversion.
The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage | Webmonkey | Wired.com.
This is an ancient problem: older versions of IE do not support the opacity CSS property. Instead, IE8 uses -ms-filter and IE prior 8 uses filter. Also, in IE, one has to be cautious about the positioning of the element the opacity properties apply to: the element has to be positioned for the filter to work properly. Another trick is to use zoom.
Let’s wrap this up in the css snippet below:
#page {
opacity: 0.5;
}
/* IE7 and less */
#page {
filter: alpha(opacity=50);
position: relative;
zoom: 1;
}
/* IE8 specific */
#page {
-ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50);
position: relative;
zoom: 1;
}
It is a pain but it works.
But what I found is that if you try to set these properties dynamically, through jQuery for instance, they are less obedient.
For filter and -ms-filter to be set through jQuery, the element has to be positioned through css and NOT by jQuery.
So one would need something like this:
/* IE less than 9 */
#page {
position: relative;
zoom: 1;
}
if($.support.opacity){
$('#page').css('opacity' , ".5")
}else {
$('#page').css('filter' , 'alpha(opacity=50)');
$('#page').css('-ms-filter' , 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50)');
}
This is empirical knowledge though. I don’t know why is it like this.
A new kid is on the block: since Monday morning Google’s new browser, Chrome, has been the most hot discussion topic on the internet. And, I guess, lots of people, all over the world,, are punching keys franticaly as we ‘speak’ , to test it.
Here is my contribution to the buzz. How does the new browser behave in terms of standards compatibility? Let’s take the tests.
ACID2 gives
Which means 100% compatibility.
ACID3 gives :
which means 78% compliance. Were it 100% it should look like this:
How do these results compare to the browsers on the market? I have run the same test on all the known browsers that pass the ACID2 test and here are the results. All the test were run on a Windows XP with SP2.
| Browser (version) | ACID2 | ACID3 |
| IE (8.0.6001) | 100% | 12% |
| Firefox (3.0.1) | 100% | 71% |
| Safari (3.0.4) | 100% | 41% |
| Opera (9.52) | 100% | 83% |
| Chrome | 100% | 78% |
So Chrome does a fairly good job in ACID3, but still trails Opera.
Update: I just spotted an article on CNET about Chrome’s standards compliance.Instead of comparing IE8 it compares IE7 on the Acid3 test and gives a result of 14% which I could not confirm. The acid servers were very slow to respond but when they did I just got a 12% as in IE8.
