In a world wide web landscape where the choice of OS, browser, and engine are becoming more and more open and free the importance of standards in the way websites are written and displayed cannot be stressed enough. If a developer has to make hacks and workarounds to ensure his site displays correctly and uniformly on a browser then in my opinion that browser has failed in its single most important job: to correctly parse, render and display the site as it is coded1.
As if I hadn’t made it clear enough already, I like WebKit. A lot! I’ve commented on its speed and reliability, but one reason that I haven’t mentioned so far is standards compliance. The single most important test available today for standards compliance on the web is the Acid3 test, and today the WebKit team have announced that the final hurdle in fully passing the Acid3 test has been overcome.
Acid3 runs a battery of 100 tests focussing primarily on JavaScript and DOM2 but also featuring vector graphics, URI processing, CSS3 and others. Acid3 returns a simple pass/fail for each test, revealing a score out of 100. WebKit has scored 100/100 on this since way back in March, but another, secondary, requirement to fully pass Acid3 it that each test should take no longer than 33ms to ensure smooth animation and this is the hurdle now passed my WebKit. The team claim speedups in both WebKit’s JavaScript and DOM engines are what have made this possible.
So, once again, I simply cannot recommend WebKit enough to anyone who is using a different browser. The latest nightlies of WebKit are available here for Mac and Windows, as is the source should you wish to compile it for a different platform.
As an appendix, here is some info on how the other browsers/engines fare, courtesy of AppleInsider. Note that Internet Explorer is consistently the poorest performer. I simply cannot understand why anyone would choose to use the beast!
Actual shipping builds of the world’s various web browsers haven’t yet reached 100%. According to figures in Wikipedia, the latest Safari 3.1.2 has a score of 75, while Firefox 3.0.2 has reached 71, Opera 9.52 has reached 84, and Internet Explorer 7 is at 14.
In internal builds, the Safari 4.0 Developer Preview has reached 100, while the latest build of Firefox Gecko engine has reached 87, the latest build of Opera earns 99, Google’s new Chrome beta has reached 79, and the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 scores 21.
Among mobile browsers, the shipping version of Safari in iPhone 2.1 reaches 74, while the Netfront browser hits 11, Opera Mobile reaches 2, Opera Mini has hit 79. Pocket Internet Explorer can’t run the test due to a lack of JavaScript support.
Why don’t you run the test and tell me what score your browser gets?
- Of course, if the code is faulty then irregularities are to be expected. [↩]
- The Document Object Model [↩]
Firefox 3.0.2 only got 71/100 but I’m going to try Opera next as Firefox is still a little buggy on my system. I’ll post my results later.
Just to let you know, I had a go with my Opera browser and it got 84/100. Shame as I liked Opera but I couldn’t get my Foxmarks to work on it.