Acid 3: The Race Continues
Thursday, March 6th, 2008The Acid 3 web standards-compliance test has been up for a while now, and there’s no release-quality browser in existence yet that fully succeeds at the test.
Let me explain what these results are telling us before I show them. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards for Internet applications. For example, XHTML, HTML, CSS, etc. Acid 3 basically takes a lot of W3C’s newer standards and tests to be sure that the browser supports the features it should and that it behaves as it should when using them. Acid 3 is a collection of 100 different test suites to be sure that these standards are being met. So when I say that browser X gets a score of 55%, this means that browser X passed 55 of the 100 test suites.
Updated August 28, 2008. Decided it was time for an update. Outdated entries are italicized and grayed. New entries are not italicized. It’s a work in progress, and it may be a while before I have all the entries updated. It’s worth noting that Safari 4′s public beta passes Acid 3 without breaking a sweat. Safari 4.0 may well be the first release-quality browser to pass Acid 3!
Updated September 7, 2008. Added Google Chrome to the list.
Updated May 19, 2009. Decided to get up to speed with some of the browsers. Not a lot has changed, though Opera’s latest release puts it in the lead as far as officially-released browsers go. Note that I do still accept submissions/requests. This list may be really out of date now, but I’d like to bring it up to date. Any help is graciously accepted. If you submit a result, please include a summary including the operating system version, browser version, and Acid3 score as well as a screenshot of the result (mainly just as proof for browsers I can’t personally verify the results for).
Updated June 11, 2009. Safari 4.0 was released on June 9, 2009. This makes it the first official release of a browser to have 100% on ACID3.
You can use this table of results as you please, but I would appreciate if people would not just copy/paste it everywhere, because the results will outdate fairly quickly, and I would like this table to get updated more frequently. So please link back to here instead of simply copying this entire table. Thanks!
Note: Italicized lines are tests which were done a long time ago, and no longer represent the current release (beta or otherwise) of the browser.
| Beta Browsers | |||
| Browser | Version | Operating System | Acid 3 Score |
 Safari | WebKit Nightly (r43808) | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 100% (0.69s) |
 Opera | 9.0 Beta (build 636) “WinGogi” | Windows Vista 32-bit | 100% (1.31s) |
 Firefox | 3.1b3 | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 93% |
 Seamonkey | 2.0a1pre nightly (2008082800) | Mac OS X 10.5.4 | 85% |
 Google Chrome | 0.2.149.29 | Windows Vista 32-bit | 79% |
| Opera | 9.50 Beta (build 9864) | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 79% |
 Camino | 2.0a1pre nightly (2008082800) | Mac OS X 10.5.4 | 71% |
| Firefox | 3.0b4 (20081016) | Mac OS X 10.5.2 | 68% |
| Firefox | 3.0b4 (2008030714) | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 68% |
| Firefox | 3.0b4 (2008030714) | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 68% |
 Internet Explorer | 8.0.6001.18241 (Beta 2) | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 21% |
| Internet Explorer | 8.0.6001.17184 (Beta 1) | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 18% |
| Internet Explorer | 8.0.6001.17184 (Beta 1) | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 18% |
| Released Browsers | |||
| Browser | Version | Operating System | Acid 3 Score |
| Safari | 4.0 (5530.17) | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 100% (0.51s) |
| Opera | 9.64 | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 85% |
| Safari | 3.1.2 (5525.20.1) * | Mac OS X 10.5.4 | 75% |
| Safari | 3.1.2 (525.21) * | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 75% |
 Flock | 2.0.3 | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 71% |
| Firefox | 3.0.10 | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 71% |
| Firefox | 3.0.10 | Windows 2000 SP4 | 71% |
 Konqueror | 4.0.3 | Linux | 65% |
 Epiphany | 2.22 | Ubuntu 8.04 (beta) | 59% |
| Camino | 1.6.7 | Mac OS X 10.5.7 | 53% |
| SeaMonkey | 1.1.11 | Mac OS X 10.5.4 | 53% |
| Epiphany | 2.20.3 | Gentoo Linux | 51% |
| Konqueror | 3.5.9 | Gentoo Linux | 51% |
| Opera | 9.26 | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 46% |
| Safari | 3.0.4 (5523.15) * | Mac OS X 10.5.2 | 39% |
| Safari | 3.0.4 (523.15) * | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 39% |
| Safari | 3.0.4 (523.15) * | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 39% |
 Mobile Safari | 3.0 (420.1) | iPhone | 39% |
 Internet Explorer | 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) | Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Multiple IE) | 14% |
| Internet Explorer | 5.50.4134.0600 | Windows ME | 14% |
| Internet Explorer | 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) | Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 | 13% |
 Internet Explorer | 7.0.5730.13 | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 12% |
| Internet Explorer | 7.0.6000.16609 | Windows Vista (32-bit) | 12% |
 Internet Explorer | 6.0 | Windows XP Service Pack 2 | 12% |
| Internet Explorer | 6.0 | Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 | 11% |
* I don’t know whether Apple meant to put 5xx or 5xxx. I highly doubt that they intended to use such an inconsistent versioning scheme, but I’m going to cite here whatever they put on the About window. Thanks to Mark Rowe from Apple for explaining this: “The leading digit of the build number signifies the platform version. 45xx.y.z is Tiger (10.4), 55xx.y.z is Leopard (10.5), and 5xx.y.z is Windows.” | |||
I guess it really comes as no surprise that Internet Explorer is currently in last place. But really, how did Internet Explorer 7 and 6 do worse than v5.5?