The next big task that I'm about to tackle on the Ubiquity XForms project is support for Safari and Chrome. In general, UXF has seemed to work pretty well in the WebKit-based browsers whenever I've tried it, but I've never run exhaustive tests.

So yesterday, for the first time, I ran the full XForms 1.1 test suite in Safari. The results were a huge disappointment: 443 tests were executed, of which 402 failed and just 41 passed. Suddenly, the job ahead seemed colossal.

After my initial shock wore off, and feeling dubious about the figures, I decided to watch the tests more closely as they were being run in Selenium. It quickly became apparent that a problem existed in our isModelReady() extension function, because Selenium was frequently executing its commands before the test forms had finished loading. Sure enough, some poking around revealed a bug that was easily resolved.

I'm pleased to be able to say that, post-commit, the test suite results for Safari are a lot more promising. Of the 443 tests that ran, 195 failed and 248 passed; a 55% (ish) pass rate. Not great, but far less daunting as a starting point. Among the failures, there look to be a few clumps of tests that may be of common origin, which bodes well for the possibility of quick wins. Submission looks like being the biggest single area that needs work, as chapter 11 failed almost in its entirety.

Issues have been raised for many of the failures in the bug tracker. So if anyone else feels like getting their hands dirty, feel free to take some. The long road to Safari support starts here!