14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer and Firefox might very well be leaders in terms of their share of the market, but it is a product situated at under 1% (according to Net Applications) of the browser install base that has become the epitome for web standards support. Opera 9.5 Beta is the first browser to reach the Acid3 standards support test finish line, and the Norway-based company has made the first build available for download. The past week, Lars Erik Bolstad, the Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, revealed that an internal build of Opera 9.5 managed to pull off a 100/100 pass rate on the Acid3 test. That specific build is up for grabs for Windows and for Linux.
Still, Bolstad has advised users that the version released for downloading is merely a variant of the WinGogi desktop and not a fully-fledged Opera build. "This is the Windows version of the reference builds that we use internally for testing Opera's platform-independent Core. 'Desktop' means it is compiled with the same feature set as our regular desktop browser. Still, we do not recommend using this build for regular Web surfing as it lacks some of the security-related features found in our regular desktop versions," Bolstad revealed.
Both Internet Explorer and Firefox still have a long way to go in order to pass the Acid3 test. At this point in time, Opera 9.5 Beta, Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 and Firefox 3.0 beta 4 all pass Acid2 test, the predecessor of Acid3. Neither IE8 Beta 1 nor Firefox 3.05 Beta 4, at this point in time, pass the 100 web standards tests that compile Acid3.
"In addition to a 100/100 pass rate and pixel-perfect rendering, the animation needs to be 'smooth' in order to pass the test formally. While the actual smoothness of the animation to some extent depends on the capabilities of the machine running the build (and even on the responsiveness of the acidtests.org web site and your network connection speed for one of the tests), there are at least two subtests where we feel we need to improve the performance in order to achieve a perfect pass on current hardware. Clicking on the 'A' in 'Acid3' brings up a dialog listing the tests that took too long to execute," Bolstad added.
Opera 9.50 Build 9864 Beta is available for download here.