Opera may very well be the last browser in terms of the audience it has gathered, but what it lacks in market share, it more than makes up for when it comes down to web standards support. After it has filed an antitrust complaint with the EU Commission against the bundle of Windows and Internet Explorer, and Microsoft's failure to adopt and support web standards, Opera is now able to offer itself as an epitome of interoperability. More so, since one of the internal build for version 9.5 of the Opera browser managed to pass the Acid3 Test with no problems, according Lars Erik Bolstad, the Head of Core Technology at Opera Software.

"I have a quick update on where we are with Acid3. Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly," Bolstad stated.

The Acid3 Test was announced on March 3, 2008, just ahead of the releases of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.0 beta 4 and Safari 3.1. So far, the internal build of Opera 9.5 is the only browser to pass the test. Acid3 is really a series of no less than 100 tests designed to ensure that browsers support the implementation of "mature web standards."

"We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera's platform independent Core," Bolstad added.

Opera 9.5 Beta is available here.
Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 can be downloaded from here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 Pre-Release is here.