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The Acid3 test has been uploaded and the next release of Safari is going to be awesome in terms of standards, currently passing with a 90/100.

http://acid3.acidtests.org

For those who don't know what this is about, the Acid test tests a browser's standards compliance. The current Safari (3.0.4) fails quite dismally with 39/100 but the nightly build for what will be Safari 3.1 is the highest passing. FireFox is around 60/100 and guess who is the biggest failure?

Safari 3.1 is going to be truly awesome in speed as well. If you're interested in trying it out download the Webkit version:

http://webkit.org/

WARNING: This is beta software and not recommended for blah blah blah

That being said here's an interesting write up about Safari 3.1 (WebKit nightly) and Acid3:

http://webkit.org/blog/158/the-acid-3-test/

This link has some pretty interesting details on current browser performance in the test.

The best bit - IE 5.5 performs better than both IE 6 and IE 7

What's brilliant about that is that Safari is so much better than the current crop of FireFox. FireFox 2 never passed Acid2 and it's only been since FireFox3 beta was launched that FireFox passed despite the fact that Safari 3.0.4 did pass Acid2.

It's no surprise that Safari 3.0.4 didn't do well in terms of Acid3 because then most of the HTML 5 standards hadn't be set. Apparently most of the Acid3 tests Safari 3.1 is failing on have to do with SVG which has only recently been laid down as a developed standard. Incidentally SVG is seen to be very important as it is an open standard and really has an opportunity to beat Flash. Being an open standard anything Flash can do SVG can do only it can do it non-proprietary. Unfortunately most of the editors out there are really only graphics editors but this will change now that the SVG standard has been fully determined.

As of the latest build WebKit has officially hit 100/100 tests. This isn't 100% as would be commonly thought of but it does mean that WebKit is now officially the only browser this high, in fact as of later builds it may actually be 100% as they were working on a fix for the SVG test that was not working correctly (turns out the test was faulty in part) so who knows.

http://webkit.org/blog/