Apple's Safari web browser and Opera have been duking it out in a race to pass the ACID 3 browser stress test. Both browsers have recently emerged with builds that reportedly pass the test.
The ACID 3 test is a test case designed by the Web Standards Project to give manufacturers a reference point and to help identify flaws in browsers. ACID tests don't necessarily prove anything, they simply create an extremely difficult test case with the idea that, if a browser can render the test, it should be able to handle almost any other page.
Where ACID 2 was designed to challenge a browser's page rendering skills, ACID 3 is aimed more at how a browser renders the DOM and handles Javascript.
According a post on the Opera weblog internal builds of Opera now pass ACID 3. As they say, “code or it didn't happen,” and to that end the Opera teams says that a technical preview version will be available on labs.opera.com within the next week or so.
Safari 3 on the other hand does have Mac and Windows builds available that reportedly render ACID 3 correctly (technically it's WebKit doing the rendering, but we'll leave that out of it for now).
The Surfin' Safari weblog also reports that its team found “a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass.” The bug has since been fixed.
While the race is very close, we have to give it to Safari since the code is available. But the point isn't who's first, the point is that both browsers are setting a very high bar with some impressive turnaround times. Both IE and Firefox have some catch-up work ahead of them.
[via Slashdot]
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