I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this today, but it looks as though the WebKit team has pushed hard to get a public nightly build of the Safari browser out that gets a perfect score on the Acid3 test. This is hot on the heals of Opera’s announcement yesterday that they currently have an internal build of their own browser that is successfully passing the test.
I downloaded and got the latest Windows nightly build running so that I could try it out for myself, and as you can see in the screenshot above it scores a perfect 100/100 on the test. One thing that I’m still trying to figure out is why the Lego-like block with the question mark appears next to the upper-left corner of the neon green box. It could have something to do with this problem that the WebKit team talked about:
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.
So Apple is the first one to have a public build of their browser that achieves a perfect score on the Acid 3 test. Now the question is what will be the first released browser that fully supports it? Maybe hell will freeze over and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will take the cake?
WebKit Blog Announcement
Thanks Nate for the tip!
Is Webkit portable? If not, is there a way to make it portable? (on Windows XP)
Edit: I realized I may need to have Safari on my computer for this to work. I think?
You will have to have Safari on your computer for this to work, but running WebKit requires no additional installation.
I downloaded the latest nightly 27th March for windows first 2 times it finished on 98/100 then 3rd time it got 100/100 but on all 3 times it did not show the lego icon like yours
Cool, now the Gecko and the Trident engine need to catch up. But I am not going to be holding my breath for Trident to get 100.
Yes, I also downloaded the latest nightly…then backed up WebKit.dll, WebKit.resources (folder) and some QuickTime DLL, then replaced those with nightly versions and hey presto! it first got stuck at 98 then completed 100, the animation is not smooth as they mentioned, gets stuck at 69 or something but I’m not getting the Lego icon.
IE IE what will thee do, will thee die a painful death?
I believe the one I had downloaded was from March 26th, which means they may have added some more fixes.
No, Presto is Opera’s rendering engine.
Sorry, I had to do it.
Oh my… It seems like the development is getting faster and faster. I remember that Acid3 is only out for a short while and now it is beaten.
The development pace is definitely picking up, and I think the push for a standards-compliant Internet is becoming increasingly important.