irst off, the good news is that Internet Explorer 8 is rumored to have passed the Acid2 Test, however, Internet Explorer 8 has not yet been release to the public in any form and this rumor is based on internal testing. No actual proof is available to the public until we get to test this future release ourselves. There is, however, a screenshot posted online to further support the statement, but I would still like to see Internet Explorer 8 perform.

On to the on-topic content, which also contains the bad news. WebStandards.org recently officially release the Acid3 Test to the public! The test has been available all along the way (the test itself took some time to develop) and I checked it out from time to time while I was waiting, but testing an incomplete test isn’t really testing at all.

I was surprised when I first saw the Acid3 Test that it didn’t have anything really comparable to the smilie face as seen in the Acid2 Test when rendered properly. However, a lot of work and code has been put into this third Acid project and it is an intensive test for all browsers! I was glad to see that Opera was the leading browser when it comes to the Acid3 Test. Although Opera currently fails the test, they achieve a score of 60/100. I ran the test in several other browsers to compare the results and here is what I found thus far:

1. Opera 9.5x (weekly build): 60/100
2. Firefox Minefield (nightly build): 59/100
3. Firefox 3.0b3pre: 57/100
4. Firefox 2.0.0.10: 50/100
5. Opera 9.25: 47/100
6. Safari 3.0.4 (523.15): 40/100
7. Internet Explorer 7: 13/100
8. Opera 8.54: 2/100

It’s a neat test (not as visually cool as the Acid2 Test)! I recommend that you test your browsers with the various Acid Tests every now and then to keep track of how well they are actually doing their job and following web standards! Please let me know if you see any different results or if you have results for versions that I wasn’t able to test!