Acid3
April 3, 2008 | In Development |There is a standard used to test web browsers called the Acid test. The idea is it allows vendors to test their products for proper web standard support. The current Acid3 test is designed to test ‘web 2.0′ dynamic specifications.
From the point of view of web content developers, standardising browser rendering is a very important process as it makes our lives easier and means we can ensure that the most people possible have access to the web content in the way in which it is intended. If we continually have to check and change our web sites to suit a particular browser’s quirks then it increases costs and ultimately means that content is inconsistent across different platforms. The original intention of the web was that it ought to be platform independent.
In practice we test our products in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. These being the three main browsers used. This can be demonstrated from analysis of web server logs which show that IE and Firefox have by far the largest market share.
You can test your browser using the Acid3 test which will score your browser out of 100. The Anomalous Anomaly blog tracks the scores for all the current browser releases and the public betas and builds. It makes for interesting reading, particular when products like IE5 beat the latest IE7…