With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.

Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!

Results

Each score is out of a possible 100 points

  1. 93 - Webkit (r31132, built on 18 March 2008)
  2. 75 - Safari 3.1
  3. 68 - Firefox 3 Beta 4
  4. 53 - Firefox 2.0.0.12 (Both Windows & OS X versions)
  5. 46 - Opera 9.26
  6. 40 - Safari 3.0
  7. 12 - Internet Explorer 7

The surprising thing to me was huge jump in the score from Safari 3.0 to 3.1 - Safari jumped a full 35 points - that’s a great compliment to the Webkit team. But in reality, the bigger compliment to the Webkit team goes to what’s in the nightly build of Webkit that I tested with - only 7 points shy of the full 100. (As opposed to the 88 points the IE team still needs to come up with.) The great thing about Webkit scoring so high, is that even though your average Mac user isn’t using the nightly build of Webkit, they’ll eventually get to reap the benefits once these builds make it into the mainline of Safari.

To do this test, I simply visited the Acid3 URL - http://acid3.acidtests.org/ - in each browser, and took a screenshot of each result. Not exactly scientific, but I got the info I wanted. This wasn’t designed to be a exhaustive listing of all browsers and how they perform, I simply decided to check things out in the browsers that most people are likely to have installed right now. (At least all the browsers that I have installed.)

Now for the screenshots:
As a reference, each browser’s output should appear like this.

Webkit

Safari 3.1

Firefox 3 Beta 4

Firefox 2.0.0.12

Opera 9.26

Safari 3.0

Internet Explorer 7