The Acid 2 test has, for a few years now, been the de facto test for your browser’s CSS capabilities. The Acid test, fewer people know, is not really about conforming to standards – passing it does not make your browser standards compliant or complete, so it’s best to understand that all it really means is that it properly handles the elements tested as well as certain errors properly. Sometime in 2005, Safari passed Acid 2, becoming the first mainline browser so earn that honor. A few years later, the current or development versions of all major browsers – including Firefox 3, IE8, Opera 9.5 – all pass the Acid 2 test.
Enter Acid 3. Acid 3 measure even more goodness, including these six “buckets”:
- Bucket 1: DOM Traversal, DOM Range, HTTP
- Bucket 2: DOM2 Core and DOM2 Events
- Bucket 3: DOM2 Views, DOM2 Style, CSS 3 selectors and Media Queries
- Bucket 4: Behavior of HTML tables and forms when manipulated by script and DOM2 HTML
- Bucket 5: Tests from the Acid3 Competition (SVG,[5] HTML, SMIL, Unicode…)
- Bucket 6: ECMAScript
Using recent browsers, everything fails pretty spectacularly. My Opera 9.26 install gets a 42/100. Safari (including iPhone) does 39/100. IE7 does 12/100, Firefox 2 does the most respectable with 52/100. Even IE8 only does 17/100 while Firefox 3 tops out at 59/100 and Opera 9.5 at 60/100. The current generation, even the next generation of major browsers are still far from coming close to rendering Acid 3 with any accuracy.
I have been playing, now and again, with Webkit nightlies, since Webkit is actually a really neat engine, and guess what it kicks out? This:
Webkit nightly on Windows Vista
Pretty impressive. Safari is pretty limited when it comes to extending its function – it doesn’t even support a “new tab” button. But the webkit and javascript core engines are respectable both in rendering skill and speed.
I have said this before, if we are gearing up for the next round of the browser wars, my money is on webkit.
It doesn’t have the monstrous legacy that IE comes from and has to support, it doesn’t have the monstrous codebase that is Mozilla. It is clean, well written and designed, fast, and compliant. IMO the only thing missing at this point is a more extensible browser UI that blends in on non apple platforms, and a top rate javascript enigne.
You should include the exact version of Firefox 3 you tested, because it is still in beta. The latest Fx3 nightly earns 70 points on Acid 3, but I would be surprised if the final version improved more than 1 or 2 points on that.
(This captcha system is really hard to please …)