The development teams for Opera and WebKit (which powers Apple’s Safari browser) both announced in the past week that their browser rendering engine had achieved a score of 100/100 in the Acid3 test for JavaScript and DOM standards compliance run by the Web Standards Project.
Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, Lars Erik Bolstad, was clearly bursting with pride when he wrote:
Since the [Acid3] test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.
And a few days later, the Opera team released a public build to prove that they weren’t all just talk.
WebKit developer Maciej Stachowiak must have been a little disappointed at being pipped at the post when he wrote on the Surfin’ Safari blog:
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering.
He also posted details about some of the more difficult bugs that the team faced; a few of them sound like real doozies.
Although representatives from both development teams admitted that they still have some work to do to address performance issues of a few of the tests, congratulations are in order for taking web standards seriously, and for their commitment to making the job of every web developer that much easier. Well done to both teams for delivering the most standards-compliant browsers in existence to date!
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april 1st
April 1st, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Why must you taunt us so??!
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:00 am
What is next …
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 am
They did pass, this doesnt look like an april fools post to me.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 am
The joke would be too obvious if the headline was, “Internet Explorer passed Acid3″
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:37 am
This isn’t a joke, just grab the latest versions. This isn’t even that new of news. It was posted on Engadget and Arstechnica a few days ago.
If memory serves the reason WebKit makes no. 1 (which it did with Acid2 as well) is because they found an error in the Acid3 test. Opera had hit 100/100 but after the Acid3 team fixed the error the guys at WebKit found they didn’t make the cut and WebKit was ready to test and they got it. Also, the original success story was only an internal build, not public.
All that matters is that it’s two of the bigger browsers that now have 100% standards compatibility with Firefox coming up fast. Now if only we could get IE to have anything but a highly pathetic showing we’d be set. Maybe by the time IE8 goes public it’ll actually get over 20/100 on Acid3.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:04 am
Yeah, that last one was from me again. I’m starting to wonder if there is a Safari issue and logging in when posting…
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 am
They passed the rendering part of the Acid3 Browser Test, not the complete test right?
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I’m not sure there’s a difference. I could be wrong however. All I know is that both Opera and WebKit have scored 100/100 on the Acid3 test. I think rending is only one specific part of the test but again I could be mistaken.
Arstechnica article:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/03/27/team-webkit-squeaks-past-team-opera-in-race-to-pass-acid-3
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I Always thought that firefox is the best SEO friendly browser for its plugin features but now i know its something diff…
April 6th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
@Hmm: Correct!
The arstechnica article is flawed (as well as many other articles from IT-magazines). It claims that Webkit and Opera actually passes the test. They do not – yet. Neither do they claim to.
They get the “score” and the rendering parts right, but they fail the “smoothness” criteria. Why won’t people (=IT journalists) cite more authoritative sources – and cite them correctly? Read what Hixie says, read Opera’s and Webkit’s own announcements. IT mags are secondary sources – and quite often get things wrong.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I agree with Safar that it passes the test. But for opera i doubt. Opera is out of our testing standards because of uncertain behaviour to normal scripts and layouts….
April 17th, 2008 at 2:36 am