WebKit passing Acid3

The WebKit development team has just passed another huge milestone. The WebKit browser engine used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome now fully passes the Acid3 test.

The Acid3 test checks how well browsers comply with the latest standards, in particular JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM).

Maciej Stachowiak of the WebKit team attributes this feat to “recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering.”

Unfortunately, it will be a few months before we see this in Safari and Chrome, but while you wait you can download a nightly build of WebKit and test this for yourself.

Google has just released a new version of their Gears project which now has support for OS X and Safari.

Google Gears “is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser“.

With Gears, web applications can naturally interact with your desktop, JavaScript performance is increased, and you can store data locally in a fully search-able database.

Gears-enabled websites include Google Docs, WordPress an YouTube Video Uploader.

A full run down on new features can be found in the Google Gears Blog, and you can download a copy of Google Gears from http://gears.google.com/.

With the release of Google Chrome, John Resig has performed JavaScript benchmark tests on a wide variety of browsers on both Windows Vista and XP. These browsers include:

• Chrome 0.2
• Safari 4
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.5.2
• Firefox 3.1
• Firefox 3.0.1
• IE7
• IE8 Beta 2

Testing, using three benchmarking tools; SunSpider, V8 Benchmark, and Dromaeo, has produced some interesting results. Results show that Google Chrome is ahead in all but one benchmark test – very impressive for a browser that is still in its early beta stages. It shows the performance of the new V8 JavaScript engine and the power of the WebKit rendering engine found in both Chrome and Safari.

You can read the full JavaScript Performance Rundown article to see the other (not-so)surprissing results.