I've been thinking about how to best tackle some web standards challenges at work this week, particularly around video on Mobile Safari and the much-anticipated HTML5 video support across the industry. So I figured I would take a closer look at web standards compliance on all the browsers I currently use since it's been a while...just for fun. And it was definitely fun, and surprising!

I used the Acid3 test available at http://acid3.acidtests.org from The Web Standards Project. For those unfamiliar with Acid3, visit the above URL where your browser will be testing and you'll see the definition of a successful test:

To pass the test, a browser must use its default settings, the animation has to be smooth, the score has to end on 100/100, and the final page has to look exactly, pixel for pixel, like this reference rendering [linked to the reference rendering.]

Here are the results. Important note: I disregarded the requirement of "the animation has to be smooth" since that's a highly subjective metric and is difficult to observe fairly on all tests. I'll stick with the scoring out of 100 and the compliance with the reference rendering. Those seem sufficiently black-and-white for a litmus test.

Using Max OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard) on Intel architecture
Google Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta -- 100/100 and rendering matches
Safari 4.0.4 (6531.21.10) -- 100/100 and rendering matches
Flock 2.5.6 -- 72/100 and many visual inconsistencies
Firefox 3.6.3 -- 94/100 and rendering matches
Camino 2.0.2 (1.9.0.18 2010021619) -- 72/100 and many visual inconsistencies (I should note it was obvious the animation was choppy on this one)

For extra fun, I also tested some browsers on my Windows XP Pro Version 2002 SP2 running in Sun's VirtualBox version 3.1.6 r59351:

Google Chrome 4.1.249.1064 (45376) -- 100/100 and rendering matches
Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 -- 12/100 and rendering is partially obscured in an iFrame
Firefox 3.6.3 -- 94/100 and rendering matches

And on iPhone OS 3.1.3 (7E18) using Mobile Safari -- 100/100 with a couple visual inconsistencies

So what's the bottom line?

As I could have guessed from the beginning, there was a wide range of results between browsers. Interestingly though, I was pleased to see that both Google Chrome and FF 3.6.3 were consistent from platform to platform.

So...consistency across platforms is a leading indicator of predictability, which helps build code that works as expected even if the code requirements vary from platform to platform.