Who’s the winner here?

1) Opera

2) Chrome, Firefox & Safari

5) Internet Explorer

The clear winner here is the Opera web browser because of its unmatched Acid3 performance and its CSS3 selector score. No other browser was able to match those specs. I placed Chrome, Firefox and Safari all in a tie for second place. Despite Firefox’s lower Acid3 score, I placed it in second because of its ability to display a smooth animation, which Safari and Chrome can’t do. The Acid3 animations in those two browsers repeatedly flicker. And in fifth place lies the mighty, non-compliant Internet Explorer. Microsoft must think they are still calling the shots because they continue to use their proprietary box model and continue to have limited CSS and DOM support.

So what does all of this mean? And what’s in it for me?

Actually, the results of the tests are quite promising. It shows that the majority of browsers are striving to be standards compliant in order to compete with each other. As newer technologies like HTML5 with open video support and the upcoming final CSS3 spec come to fruition, we can only hope that these mainstream browsers continue to fully embrace the standards. Time will only tell though. Also keep in mind that this is great news for web developers and users who have had to rely on proprietary plug-ins like Flash, Java and Silverlight over the last decade for dynamic content and multimedia delivery. Stay tuned and remember that web standards matter!