The development teams for Opera and WebKit (which powers Apple’s Safari browser) both announced in the past week that their browser rendering engine had achieved a score of 100/100 in the Acid3 test for JavaScript and DOM standards compliance run by the Web Standards Project.
Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, Lars Erik Bolstad, was clearly bursting with pride when he wrote:
Since the [Acid3] test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.
And a few days later, the Opera team released a public build to prove that they weren’t all just talk.
WebKit developer Maciej Stachowiak must have been a little disappointed at being pipped at the post when he wrote on the Surfin’ Safari blog:
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering.
He also posted details about some of the more difficult bugs that the team faced; a few of them sound like real doozies.
Although representatives from both development teams admitted that they still have some work to do to address performance issues of a few of the tests, congratulations are in order for taking web standards seriously, and for their commitment to making the job of every web developer that much easier. Well done to both teams for delivering the most standards-compliant browsers in existence to date!
Matthew MagainMatthew Magain is a UX designer with over 15 years of experience creating exceptional digital experiences for companies such as IBM, Australia Post, and sitepoint.com. He is currently the Chief Doodler at Sketch Group, Co-founder of UX Mastery, and recently co-authored Everyday UX, an inspiring collection of interviews with some of the best UX Designers in the world. Matthew is also the creator of Charlie Weatherburn and the Flying Machine.
