Ian Hickson finally announced the availability of Acid3 (yesterday/today, depending on time zone); which runs 100 tests to see how well a browser handles DOM scripting (ie. W3C DOM2 + ECMAScript 262). Simply, DOM scripting is what adds interactivity to your favorite sites; like Google Mail and Flickr, for example.

I found it curious that it was the same day the IE team decided that they might, release a version of IE8 that passes Acid2 in real life (ie. the meta IE version thing is no longer required to get edge mode rendering)...if we’re lucky…and the suits don’t step in…and the corporations with broken intranet applications don’t throw their weight around…and Uncle Bob’s picture gallery doesn’t break…and the internet doesn’t break…

Not to berate the IE team, there is still no release version of Firefox that can pass Acid2 and nobody really cares; web developers still flock to FF (FF3 betas do pass Acid2, so it seems likely that the official FF3 will pass). Safari and Opera (and some other browsers nobody ever heard of) have been passing Acid2 for nearly three years now. So the schedule for what Acid3 compliance might look like:

• April (maybe March) 2008 Webkit passes Acid3
• Early Summer 2008 Opera (probably 9.5 official) passes Acid3
• Eventually (maybe 2008?) Firefox 3 is released and passes Acid2
• Early 2009 IE8 passes Acid2
• 2010 Firefox passes Acid3
• 2011 IE passes Acid3

As it stands, Opera (9.5 beta) and Firefox (3 beta) have scores around 60/100, Webkit (nightly) is already scoring 87/100; IE7 is trying it’s hardest.