The Acid 3 Test has been officially released. The test has been in development for some time, with much of that development happening in the open.

The Acid 3 test is far more complex than the Acid 2 test. It covers a wider range of standards and consists of many more individual tests. Browsers have to render a sequence of boxes that display dynamically in a stairstep pattern. For every cluster of tests passed successfully, the boxes will fill in with a color, which signifies that all of the tests covered by that block have passed.

If you run Acid 3 on the shipping versions of current browsers (Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera 9, IE7), you’ll see that they all score quite low. For example Safari 3 scores a 39/100. This percentage score is a bit misleading however. The situation with all four browser engines really isn’t that bad.

You can think of the Acid 3 test as consisting of 100 individual test suites. In order for a browser engine to claim one of these precious 100 points, it has to pass a whole battery of tests around a specific standard. In other words it’s like the browser is being asked to take 100 separate exams and score an A+ on each test in order to get any credit at all.

The reality is that all of the browsers are doing much better than their scores would have you believe, since the engines are often passing a majority of the subtests and experiencing minor failures that cost them the point for that section.

Shipping Safari scores a 39/100 with some significant rendering errors. We’ve been working hard since the test surfaced and are pleased to report that we’ve entered the “A” range on the test with a score of 90/100.

So what did we fix to gain so many points?

Bug 17064 has all the details, but here are the highlights.

Support for CSS3 Selectors

We added support for all of the remaining CSS3 selectors. These include selectors like nth-child, nth-of-type, last-child, last-of-type, etc. These selectors were already implemented in KHTML, and the KHTML developers had even kindly provided patches for us in the relevant WebKit bugs. Therefore it was a simple matter of taking those patches, updating them to the WebKit codebase, and then merging them in. A big thanks to the KHTML developers for their hard work in this area.

Parsing Bugs

WebKit had a number of minor parsing bugs that Acid 3 targeted. The boxes did not render properly because of an obscure parsing bug that the test exploited (thanks, Hixie). In addition a number of other parsing bugs kept us from completely passing individual tests. We have updated our parser to be much closer to the HTML5-specified parsing rules.

WebKit has also never parsed DOCTYPEs before. I re-wrote WebKit’s DOCTYPE parsing to match the HTML5 specification, and so now if you put a DOCTYPE into your page it will be present in the DOM. In addition many bugs centered around proper mode resolution (quirks vs. strict) have now been fixed. You can document.write a DOCTYPE for example in a new document and have the correct mode be selected.

SVG

Acid3 has many SVG tests. We’ve been hard at work making these tests pass. In particular SVG font support and other aspects of the SVG DOM have been tested. Many of the remaining 10 points are SVG failures. We’ll be working on SVG animation in order to pass the last few SVG tests.

DOM

Acid3 tests a lot of DOM level 2 features, like traversal and ranges. It particularly focuses on the “liveness” of objects, e.g., making sure everything updates properly when you dynamically change a document by adding/removing nodes. Most of our failures in this area had to do with not behaving properly in the presence of these dynamic changes (even though we tended to pass the more static tests).

Now that we’re closing in on 100%, we’ll be blogging about each fix as it happens, so that you can follow our progress from the blog.