View this article at: http://dev.macnn.com/articles/08/03/10/webkit.most.compliant
Monday, Mar 10, 2008 1:45pm

Webkit: most compliant with...

The future of the Safari web browser has been a topic of great interest lately, and some MacNN forum members have discovered that Webkit – Safari's developmental alter ego – is so far the most compliant with next generation web standards. According to the forum members' findings, WebKit and Safari 3.1 receive the highest scores on the Acid3 compliancy tests at 90-percent and 74-percent respectively, while Camino 2.0a1, Firefox 3.0b5, and Seamonkey 2.0a1 come in third place at 69-percent.

The current build of Safari (39-percent), v3.0.4, comes in under the current builds of Firefox (51- to 59-percent) and Opera (60-percent), however, but are more than double than that of even the most recent beta of Internet Explorer on the PC. Interestingly, Internet Explorer 5.50.4807.2300 (13- to 14-percent) is rated higher than both Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0.x (11- to 12-percent) While not an official standards test, the Acid3 test puts web browsers through a series of variables which form an image of several colored bars and text. In addition to CSS and XHTML – both present in the Acid2 test – Acid3 also uses several DOM2 script events to benchmark browsers. The percentage rating signifies how much of the image the browser was able to draw using the provided scripts and equations.

Webkit's score on Acid3

The completed Acid3 visual