Microsoft has released a fourth and final platform preview release of Internet Explorer 9.
This latest release scores 95/100 in the Acid3 test, compared to the first platform preview which only scored 55/100. For comparison, Firefox 3.6 scores 94/100.
Also new in this release is full support for hardware accelerated HTML5, improved SVG support, and improved JavaScript performance. A more detailed list of changes can be found in the IEBlog.
A public beta is widely expected in September 2010.
Tiago Sá wrote on August 7, 2010 at 8:39 pm
It should be known that Firefox 4.0 will score 97/100 on Acid3 (as the betas score now) and that there are no plans to make it pass the remaining 3 tests, since those are related to custom fonts in SVG, and, due to lack of demand from developers, a strategical decision, and some standards having priority over others, coupled with the lack of infinite resources, Mozilla has decided it won’t be treating SVG fonts as a priority (so it probably won’t be in for Firefox 4). Still, if you want to code it and get it into Firefox, you can check the bug entry here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490
Alex wrote on August 7, 2010 at 9:04 pm
And to give the full comparison, Chrome, Opera, and Safari all get 100/100 in Acid3.
It’s just IE and Firefox lagging on this one.
Tiago Sá wrote on August 7, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Well, it’s just a test. If you look at it objectively, Firefox, for example, supports more HTML5 stuff than any browser, and Opera, the first one to reach 100/100 in acid3, doesn’t have as much standards stuff as the competition. I don’t know about Internet Explorer, but I’d guess they’re just making the browser to pass acid3 or get a good score, and are forgetting about what’s not tested there.
It’s just a test. But still, once IE9 passes it (since Firefox won’t, in the foreseeable future, as I said), we’ll get acid4 to worry about, and then we’ll see (hopefully) a better picture of standard compliance across browsers. It’s always more important to see how each browser fares when the test is released rather than after a while, because corporations like Apple, Google and Microsoft will shape their browsers to the test, rather than to the web.