I published my results of running ten different SVG implementations through the SVG Test Suite.
I ran the tests on various flavours of Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, Adobe SVG Viewer, Renesis, and Batik. Go check out how your favourite web browser or SVG plugin scored when I ran it through all 280 tests: Click Here.
This is one of those times when I almost hesitate to even publish this because people will officially know I wasted hours of my life browsing web pages to obtain these results. Then again, we all waste hours of our lives browsing web pages - the only difference is we don’t record our findings in a spreadsheet.
I hope some people will find this interesting. Some people might consider it a challenge. Other people may find it discouraging, disappointing, a waste of time, an over-simplification, or even offensive. Oh well, at least now I have my own scoring system for anybody who wants to put out a SVG plugin or support for SVG (Microsoft, care to give it a whirl?).
Tags: svgsupport
I have a mac and I’d like to see how complete WebKit is when it comes to SVG.
2007-04-22 @ 11:51 PM
Thanks for your help, Mike - I have updated the page with your results.
2007-04-24 @ 9:27 AM
Very nice indeed. This is a great comparision to see, side by side. I presume the large red chuck in the middle of a lot of them is declerative animation? Is there any way a cunning Javascript rollover could be added to say what test a line represents?
Nice one!
Allan
2007-04-25 @ 5:15 AM
> I presume the large red chuck in the middle of a lot of them is declerative animation?
Yes, you are correct.
> Is there any way a cunning Javascript rollover could be added to say what test a line represents?
I had similar ideas. I could also turn this into a SVG document that has 280 * 11 rectangles, each wrapped in a svg:a element. This would make the process much more complicated than just copying a region in an Excel workbook and pasting it into Microsoft Paint. Oh well, something to work on later.
2007-04-25 @ 6:03 AM
The test misses TinyLine (www.tinyline.com) and BitFlash (www.bitflash.com) SVG players. Even BitFlash is currently moving to Mobile market, they still have the PC version available.
I didn’t find my SVG animations working besides Opera 9 and Adobe plugin, when I removed some unesserary META’s and still waiting somebody to provide me a proper SVG drivers. My animated stories are around 2 minutes length and are SVG Tiny 1.1 compatible. I wrote an article Experiences producing SVG animated movies to my blog about it.
2007-05-05 @ 2:35 AM
It’s worth noting that nightly builds of WebKit have some of the more bleeding-edge SVG features disabled. I believe filters and animation are two features that are implemented and working correctly inside Webkit but are disabled by default until more testing can be done.
2007-05-09 @ 1:36 AM
Thanks, Mark. Yes, I’m aware that filters and animation have been disabled in the Webkit nightlies. I also heard that Maciej was going to disable the <use> code, but that decision was later changed (which is a good thing!)
2007-05-09 @ 8:47 AM
It would be nice if you implemented the graph as an SVG which named the test as you hovered the mouse. That way I could zoom in and see which ones failed. It would also help if you grouped the rows by module.
2007-05-23 @ 12:51 PM
Nicholas - you read my mind! This is actually very close to what I was thinking (minus the grouping by module). I’m not sure I have the time for this at the moment though, it’s a lot of tests to run and that took up the bulk of the time.
2007-05-23 @ 4:17 PM
Your spreadsheet would be very much more interesting than the image; if you don’t have the time to fix that, could you perhaps at least publish it, or even upload it to editgrid, so that others could do the work you don’t have time for? Like making an Exhibit of it, for instance, to add facet browsing (on module, browser, and probably other aspects too). CSV file?
2007-05-30 @ 9:08 AM
I love the chart; however, is there any chance of seeing CSV (Corel SVG Viewer) results?
2007-06-19 @ 10:31 PM
Wow - someone actually asked for CSV!
Is there a place I can download the last supported version of CSV without having to sign up for an account with Corel, etc?
2007-06-20 @ 10:19 PM
Jeff, your chart is one of the most informing pieces of information I have seen on SVG support so far. Great work. I think it’s so great that it should get a permanent domain of it’s own. You could have a whole website evolve around it. Please keep it up to date
Cheers,
Jacobus
P.s.1. Good luck fining CSV. I’ve tried without luck.
P.s.2. Of the mark: I’ve spent 2 days trying to get matrix.inverse() to work on “inline SVG” in Safari beta. If you come accross a hack…. please share it. I desparately need it.
2007-06-29 @ 6:04 AM
It’s disappointing that Corel requires you to register to download free software… I imagine that stops a great deal of potential users right there. There is bugmenot though..
I’m surprised that CSV isn’t on download.com or any other download site. I didn’t see anything in the license or terms of service that would prohibit that, but perhaps I missed it.
2007-07-01 @ 5:56 PM
Stephen, My understanding is that CSV isn’t as good as ASV - and ASV is freely available for download and what the majority of IE users would have - that’s the reason I left CSV off. I may one day get around to it, but if I remember correctly it hasn’t been supported for even longer than ASV …
2007-07-01 @ 7:01 PM
nitpicking:
- rotate 90 degrees, so it’s easier to read the names of the viewers. As background of these names take the same GreenYellowRed, but now all ordered GreenYellowRed (for easy comparing between viewers)
- make date it’s own column
- You forgot the B from Beta with Batik 1.7
- Many people wouldn’t call Batik a plug-in (i’d like a plug-in version of Batik actually)
2007-07-04 @ 7:34 PM
I did a similar thing for Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SVG_Test_Suite_Compliance
oh, and by your scoring Inkscape gets about a 53% which doesn’t seem a lot for a SVG editor… still at least some parts are improving (filters and parts of the text tests) and most of the features it supports it can edit 
however somehow the copy of the SVG test suite only has 275 tests? might be an old one on my pc (oh well). As you say the “almost pass” is very subjective, so I tried to be as strict as possible
tomh
2007-07-24 @ 12:14 PM
@stelt: Can you clarify what you mean in the second sentence of your first point?
@tomh: Interesting information - so Inkscape, Mozilla and Webkit all render roughly the same subset of SVG?
2007-07-24 @ 2:15 PM
I suppose you could call the subset that Inkscape / Mozilla / Webkit implement the easy to do or the needed to render the most common SVG’s subset.
For example the SVG fonts issue means that you have to start doing the job that you would normally expect the OS or a low level library to provide, so you ever design it strait form the start or you say, I’m going to let the OS deal with this for the moment and make this useful for 99% of cases and worry about the (very) few times you need SVG font support much latter. (which is kind of self perpetuating)
The same goes for animation, its much easier to market Inkscape as a Vector graphics editor which only does still images than it would be to have it support animation and not be easy to use or lacking basic editing capabilities…
2007-07-24 @ 5:04 PM
Hi there,
Have you considered running the SVG tests on the Amaya browser? I’ve found it to be slightly below Opera, but above most of the others - it supports animation, etc…
Cheers.
2007-07-26 @ 10:08 AM
Richard,
Thanks for the idea - I wasn’t aware that Amaya was very strong in its SVG support - I’ll have to check it out eventually.
Jeff
2007-07-26 @ 10:53 AM
@stelt: Can you clarify what you mean in the second sentence of your first point?
clarifying “nitpicking:
- rotate 90 degrees, so it’s easier to read the names of the viewers. As background of these names take the same GreenYellowRed, but now all ordered GreenYellowRed (for easy comparing between viewers)”:
Now the backgroundcolor of the names is one of 2 fixed colors depending on whether it’s a plug-in or native SVG rendering. Now say the test result for a viewer is GYRGYRGYRGGY (Green,Yellow,Red), then the backgroundcolors for the name of the viewer would be GGGGGYYYYRRR (to easier compare the percentages)
2007-07-30 @ 6:56 AM
Thanks for so quickly adding all the cutting-edge viewers in your comparison now Opera has released their 9.5 Alpha1. In your image you forget “b1″ (beta1) behind “Batik”. Pretty soon the first Beta of Firefox is coming out. I’ll be checking your comparison right after
BTW, Firefox 1.5 is no longer supported, though still used by about a quarter of the Firefox users.
2007-09-04 @ 6:20 PM
Stelt,
Thanks - I know that I have to implement a couple of your suggestions still too. I’ll get to that eventually
Jeff
2007-09-04 @ 6:45 PM
End of the month we’ ll have Safari 3, so native SVG support has then spread to all (1%+) modern browsers (read all browsers other than Internet Explorer). At the same time Opera, already in the lead will release 9.5 beta. And of course we’re also all looking forward to Firefox 3 beta.
2007-10-17 @ 12:23 PM
Thanks for the svg-support image.
2007-10-27 @ 9:11 AM
This chart is a really useful consolidation of lots of info. But based on what I see, it appears that Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 have approximateley the same level of SVG support. I have been struggling with making my SVG charts appear without using the Adobe plugin, so I thought that 1.5 would solve all my problems. Alas, no such luck. Any suggestion as to where to look or whom to ask for assistance getting SVG to appear correctly? SVG seems to be losing marketshare to Flash, and I worry that I am going down a road that will no longer exist in a few years.
Thanks,
Michael
2007-12-11 @ 4:16 PM
@Michael B: Yes, there was very little work done from an SVG perspective between Firefox 1.5 and 2.0. I would suggest you check out Firefox 3.0 which has a good amount of improvement. Of course, the “reference” implementation should be Opera 9, but it’s hard to justify coding for that browser with only ~1% market share. Please check out the Yahoo! Groups svg-developers and ask your questions there. The SVG wiki is a good place too. In terms of “marketshare”, SVG never had any to begin with, so it’s hard to say it’s “losing” marketshare against Flash.
2007-12-11 @ 7:48 PM
Just a quick question about the updated graph: Why does “Firefox 3 Beta 2″ have a lower percentage than “Firefox 3.0 preA8″ on your chart? Just curious if its a typo or if Mozilla removed SVG functionality between Alpha 8 and Beta 2.
2007-12-20 @ 2:16 PM
@kwerboom: Beta 2 had a couple small regressions from pre-Alpha 8. Robert Longson has already contacted me about this updated chart and I have sent him the .xls file with my notes. This isn’t removed functionality so much as some (hopefully) minor bugs.
2007-12-20 @ 3:04 PM
I notice you’ve added Internet Explorer to your list. Do you know something we don’t?!
2007-12-20 @ 9:08 PM
@Gyrobo: No, I’m just trying to increase awareness that IE is the only browser out there that doesn’t support SVG yet.
2007-12-20 @ 11:10 PM
Gotcha.
2007-12-20 @ 11:36 PM
Any tests for librsvg? I ask because I’m writing up SVG renderers for the MediaWiki manual: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Administration#SVG
2008-01-11 @ 12:08 PM
@David: Sorry I haven’t experimented down to the library level (only at the desktop browser level, really). Things get really murky for me when trying to investigate library dependencies. This page says that Mozilla can use it. This page hints that there’s some relationship between cairo and librsvg. I know that Firefox 3 uses cairo as its graphic rendering layer…
2008-01-11 @ 2:18 PM
you typed year 1905 for asv3 in your table
2008-01-13 @ 9:17 PM
AG: I believe it’s a joke. I personally found it hilarious!
Also, nice move on the IE7: 0% sarcasm… 
Thank you for this great piece of work and for the many hours (I can only imagine) you invested on it!
2008-01-25 @ 9:18 AM
@Helder: Actually, the ASV date was an accident - but in retrospect, a pretty funny joke that I’ll now take credit for.
2008-01-25 @ 10:17 AM
Can you maybe take a look at http://wiki.svg.org/Viewer_Matrix to see what needs updating there, as you know a lot of the matter
2008-01-28 @ 7:13 AM
I’m interested to know what row correspond to what test.
Could you provide the raw data results ?
Thanks !
2008-02-19 @ 9:46 AM
Hi Jeff,
why the the has the pre beta 4 th same result in percentage as the pre-beta 3? (by the way: the pictures seem to be right because the beta 4 has not so many bug/errors and “no’s”)
mfg
mabdul
2008-02-20 @ 3:24 PM
@mabdul: There were several improvements in the latest Firefox 3. However, there were also several regressions due to Bug 418164, which apparently has now been fixed. It was just an odd coincidence that the scores happened to be the same…
2008-02-20 @ 3:31 PM
Safari 3.1 is out, i’m looking forward to seeing it compared
2008-03-18 @ 8:50 AM
@stelt: Thanks. I’ve played with Safari 3.1 through the Apple Developer Connection, but I couldn’t get a straight answer on whether I was allowed to record the results publicly or not. Furthermore, it confused me that Safari 3 was in Beta and never was officially released - now they’re on to Safari 3.1 but it doesn’t say Beta on the website. Anyway, I’m happier with Safari 3.1 as it picked up some of the fixes from WebKit that makes this site render properly. I’ll get to updating svg-support some time this week with the results.
2008-03-18 @ 9:24 AM
Maybe you should be leading the implementors panel at SVG Open.
2008-03-19 @ 12:15 PM
So, can we see a spreadsheet of the results (either in comma separated or excel or something else)?
2008-03-20 @ 9:51 AM
@Aaron: Click on the image. I hope that works…
2008-03-20 @ 11:35 AM
hi jeff,
i wrote down the same question like in the mail:
what about testing prince xml (www.princexmilö.com) they have already a good documentary since 5.1….)
mfg mabdul
2008-03-22 @ 8:11 PM
Can you maybe add a link to http://wiki.svg.org/Viewer_Matrix near the tri-color image?
2008-03-31 @ 6:04 PM
@stelt: Done.
2008-03-31 @ 6:58 PM
Renesis 1.0 was just released.
Hopefully it throws out ASV at many places.
2008-05-02 @ 8:24 AM
Opera has released Beta2. How will it stand out against a Batik nightly ?
2008-05-06 @ 11:52 AM
@stelt: I’m currently having an issue with my Opera 9.5 beta builds that is under investigation. But to be honest, now that Opera and Batik score so high I’m not as concerned about them. I’m more concerned with the ‘long poles of the tent’ (Renesis and Mozilla and WebKit). Maybe it’s time to bust out the SVGT 1.2 Tiny test suite and start a new chart to keep Opera in the races?
2008-05-06 @ 11:55 AM
I keep hoping to see some evidence that there will be a replacement “SVG plugin” for IE (Instead of the Adobe one) but I guess if you don’t even mention that, it does not exist. I’m suspecting that IE does not like SVG because it wants to promote it’s own Vector Graphics “Browser extension” (Silverlight). Does anyone else think that SVG will become so important at some stage that IE will WANT to support it?
2008-05-17 @ 8:11 AM
Hi Charles,
There is a SVG plugin for Internet Explorer that is under active development (and it is on my chart): the Renesis Plugin 1.0.
Yes someone does think so. Me.
Of course I am admittedly biased.
2008-05-17 @ 2:26 PM
Thats interesting. I’m wondering if it’s possible for a user who surfs to an SVG webpage to be offered a plugin if necessary? I mean if the user is using a Mozilla Firefox browser for example this option would not be offered (native support). The code would of course “know” which browser the user was using and ideally offer the relevent download and would not if the relevent plugin was NOT in place. Is this possible?, I have yet to see and implementation of this.
2008-05-17 @ 7:19 PM
@Charles: It’s definitely something worth considering. You can probably do this by the fact that browsers that do not understand SVG will render the ‘fallback’ content inside the object element.
2008-05-17 @ 8:25 PM
As most of the changes to the SVG wiki are updates to the Viewer Matrix, mostly meaning new ‘releases’ of SVG viewers, you might find the following RSS-feed handy:
http://wiki.svg.org/Special:Recentchanges?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=30&limit=500&feed=rss
2008-05-18 @ 4:46 PM
@Stelt: Nice, except that it’s an empty feed…
2008-05-18 @ 10:34 PM
Argh
svg.org in general has trouble with feeds it seems
2008-05-19 @ 7:39 AM
I think you meant Firefox 2.0.0.1 (instead of 2.0.1)
Maybe strike-through versions that are overtaken in all respects (equal/better on (all) test(s), equal/better on status/version (nightly/alpha/beta/RC/release) by other versions mentioned?
As i expect many people to not care about those versions much (only IE users stick to old versions, and there’s no difference between 0% and 0% anyway), except of course for seeing how much the percentage is changing over time.
At this moment that would mean Fx1.5 and Fx3preB4 (others that are equal/better on status/version have regressions)
When you have absolutely nothing better to do,
, ordered by my preference:
Renesis 1.1
Konqueror newest (KDE is at 4.0.4 already)
Fx3RC1
FxRC1+SMIL
Safari 3.1.1
Opera 9.50b2
Opera 9.27
WebKit newest nightly
Batik newest nightly
Fx 2.0.0.14
Opera weekly (last one fixed a Windows specific SVG bug)
2008-05-21 @ 4:47 AM
Are Firefox+SMIL builds publicly available or one must build them from scratch (i.e., by downloading the source code, applying the relevant patch(es) and building the result)?
2008-06-08 @ 4:47 AM
@Helder: If you go visit the Bugzilla bug the current assignee (Daniel Holbert) has some instructions on building his branch/repository. Chris Double also posted some earlier snapshot binaries for download. Hope this helps.
2008-06-08 @ 12:52 PM
‘manual RSS for wiki.svg.org’: Firefox 3 RC2 released
2008-06-09 @ 5:39 AM
Opera 9.5 released. Does it add to its score ?
2008-06-12 @ 10:17 AM
@stelt: I don’t think so. I wouldn’t expect much shift in Opera or Batik’s SVG 1.1. score going forward. I think there are errors in the test suite that prevent 100% pass anyway.
I’ll probably do Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 official releases at the same time, just to officially run them through the paces and then remove the alphas and betas from the chart…
At some point in time, I’ll have to start getting dirty with the SVGT 1.2 suite. That thing is several times larger than the SVGF 1.1 suite and nearing completion now.
2008-06-12 @ 11:00 AM
I listed:
- tests no viewer passes (more likely to be wrong?)
- tests that both Batik and Opera don’t pass, but at least 1 viewer passes (a bit more likely to be wrong?)
to Cameron(Batik) and Erik(Opera) on IRC
I hope that helps prioritizing in fixing the tests and implementations.
2008-06-16 @ 4:23 PM
@stelt: I saw Erik had updated the SVG WG wiki with this information, so thank you for providing it to him!
2008-06-18 @ 12:40 AM
Looks like Batik killed a few more bugs since the 1.7 release: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/status.html#test
And as Opera 9.5 had a regression setting it back the minimal 0.18 difference, I say Batik has a small lead at the moment, towards a 100% score on this test.
I’m however mostly looking forward to a Firefox 3.1 release and someone wrapping up Batik into an IE plug-in.
2008-07-02 @ 2:59 PM
Based on the link in the above entry i calculated the score of Batik nightly: 96.18%
2008-07-05 @ 5:08 AM
@Richard,
>Have you considered running the SVG tests on the Amaya browser?
> I’ve found it to be slightly below Opera, but above most of the others - it supports animation, etc…
Well, unfortunately Amaya support not as strong as in recent native browsers, although supporting a subset of SVG animation surely deserves attention.
@Jeff Schiller
>I’ll have to check it out eventually.
Could this be the right time to take Amaya into consideration…? The browser/editor is in the process of releasing 10.1 which is expected to inclusively support some SVG editing. Recently 10.1-pre3 was made available [1]: although some noticeable bugs are still present, it would be great seeing it listed and tested in SVG implementations!
Regards,
Helder Magalhães
[1] http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/BinDist.html
2008-07-10 @ 10:01 AM
@Helder: Since February, my chart/table has Amaya 10. Based on my last experience, I doubt I’ll have any time in the short term for preview versions of Amaya 10.1 unless significant improvements are being made to its level of support.
2008-07-10 @ 10:28 AM
@Jeff Schiller
What happened to me? Was I woken up?
Yes, of course Amaya is there [1], I was probably just filtering (mentally) the table as there are several rows per implementation. Sorry ’bout the false alarm!
[1] http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php
2008-07-11 @ 10:53 AM
Have you considered adding SVG Map Toolkit [1] (currently at 0.6) to the list?
On one hand, it is being (or at least seems to be) actively developed.
On the other hand, its support seems rather incomplete (no script!) and buggy and there’s lack of a better feedback mechanism (such as a bug tracker tool) - aside from the (apparently formal and almost invisible) email contact [2].
The limitations vs. benefit make me wonder if this is a good idea, though I’d like to leave that for your consideration…
[1] http://blog.svg-map.com/2007/09/svg_map_toolkit.html
[2] http://blog.svg-map.com/about/index.html
2008-08-04 @ 5:59 AM
Well, somehow related, I just found out GPAC features something like a developer builds repository [1]. The framework features SVG support, which can be used as standalone or as a plug-in - Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera supported.
Support compliance seems to be fairly good [2] - at least, much better then the results achieved during the last interim implementation report [3], where most were marked “Unknown” (probably not tested).
A specific section dedicated SVG status and support within the framework [3] is available.
[1] http://www.tsi.enst.fr/~concolat/GPAC/?C=M;O=A
[2] http://gpac.sourceforge.net/gpac_svg_testsuite_status.xml
[3] http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20070907/matrix.html
[4] http://gpac.sourceforge.net/feat_n_svg.php
2008-08-07 @ 9:14 AM
@Helder: I was contacted two days ago by Cyril (lead dev on GPAC) and he sent me a build. I’m going through the test cases (slowly). The IE plugin still needs a little work…
2008-08-07 @ 11:39 AM
It seems that the “IE8 Beta 1″ and respective date can be updated to “IE8 Beta 2″, “2008-08-27″ [1]. Although I didn’t test for sure, I guess 0% still applies…
I’d also suggest removing the “ten different SVG implementations”: it seems outdated (or are you simply not counting Internet Explorer?
) and may easily deprecate as more reasonable implementations are made available. 
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/internet-explorer-8-beta-2-now-available.aspx
2008-09-13 @ 11:29 AM
Just another request to update for FF3.1, a recent Webkit nightly, Opera 9.6, IE8b2 (ahem) and to drop old beta versions (especially all those WebKits). Kudos for including Amaya though
2008-10-10 @ 10:08 AM
Nicholas: Yeah, I’ll have to find some time for Firefox 3.1 (probably only when it gets closer to being released though) and a more recent Webkit nightly. I don’t anticipate a need for an Opera 9.6 column (just like I didn’t for Opera 9.2), but if I do find myself with some extra time or something I’ll give it a go.
Just an FYI: No updates planned this month though.
2008-10-10 @ 12:28 PM