Looks like the browser wars are on again in full force. At the moment the latest builds of Webkit and an internal build of Opera have managed to score a full 100/100 in Acid3 test. The Webkit team has pushed itself hard to defeat Acid3 and have released a public nightly build that passes the test.It was Opera that achieved the perfect 100 first but Webkit followed up nicely helping fixing some bugs in Acid3.

The animation isn’t smooth at the moment but Webkit team is working hard to resolve the bugs. Here’s what they said on their blog

We have a slight glitch in the text rendering that is likely to be fixed soon (patch in progress). Also, the animation is required to be smooth. On typical machines, if you look really closely, you can see a small glitch in the animation on test 26 because 26 is designed to be a performance test. However, we think we are faster than all other browsers on test 26. What constitutes a smooth animation is somewhat subjective.

Looks like Apple is currently in the drivers seat with the Acid3 tests and it might have the first public release of Safari that achieves 100/100 but Opera isn’t far behind. They plan to release their private internal built later next week. Who do you think will win this race?

At the moment IE is struggling to find its feet in Acid3 while Firefox 3 is doing pretty well. Lets see how this turns out. Do you really care which browser comes out on top, because its after all the real world performance that matters right?

Opera Announcement | Webkit Announcement

Ian Hickson, the Google Employee was assigned the job of working on the next generation Acid test has completed his work and the Acid3 test is live at its new home http://acid3.acidtests.org/. The Acid test is a test which we all use to measure a Web Browser’s adherence to standards. Read more about Acid tests on this wikipedia page.

Unlike the first acid test, which focused on the box model, and the second acid test, which covered a broad variety of basic HTML and CSS features, Acid3 covers 100 of the nooks and crannies of HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, SVG and XML, all through the medium of DOM scripting, a critical requirement for any modern web application.

Ian Hickson wrote 90 tests while the other 10 tests were written by web developers and browser vendors. The Acid3 test assumes much importance after the team behind IE8 recently allowed that it clears the Acid2 test. The IE team has said that a special HTTP header will be required for the browser to clear the Acid2 test. Whether or not, such HTTP headers are required for the Acid3 test remains a big question..

I have begin my preliminary testing on all the popular browsers operating in default settings, and I will update this post with the results sometime tomorrow. Until then I suggest you perform the Acid3 test yourself and see how you fare…

Via CSS3.INFO