It’s official: the WebKit team has pushed forward and is first at the finish line. It achieved a full 100/100 on the Acid3 test with the latest nightly build. The Acid tests put a browser through a series of tests to see how well the browser follows web standards.
Today we would like to announce that WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3. A while back, we posted that we scored 100/100 and matched the reference rendering. Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering, we have passed the third condition, smooth animation on reference hardware. - from the Surfin’ Safari blog.
By comparison, Firefox’s Gecko engine scores 87, Opera’s Presto is very close at 99, and Google’s Chrome, an offshoot of WebKit, scores 79. Safari 4 Developer Preview has been able to score 100 for some time now. It’s just that they have passed the third condition for ‘smooth animation on reference hardware’.
They were able to pass it largely due to the new Squirrelfish Extreme JavaScript engine for fast JavaScript processing, somewhere around 4 times as fast as the one in Safari 3.1. The difference is obvious in AJAX heavy web applications like MobileMe and Google Docs.
Should you download this release? Sure! The WebKit browser installs as a separate application but looks and behaves exactly like Safari does. It even shares your bookmarks. You can run them side by side or have them take turns. The nightly builds are generally regarded as being very stable, but do not attempt to use them in mission critical environments. Separate versions for both Mac and Windows are available, and so is the source code for the open source enthusiasts.
