Microsoft Internet Explorer 8’s Epic Fail: Scores 20/100 on Acid3 vs. Apple Safari’s perfect 100

“When IE 8 dropped on Thursday, many in the development community rushed to download it, install it and try it out on the Acid 3 Test, developed by The Web Standards Project. All over the world, the score was turning up the same for almost everyone. Out of a possible score of 100, IE 8 rang up 20. It failed the test and failed it badly,” Ed Moltzen reports for ChannelWeb.

“While IE 8 is scoring 20 out of 100 on the Acid 3 standards test, a company down the coast, in Cupertino, Calif., did just a tad better. Apple’s Safari 4 browser scores 100 on Acid 3. They also have a little product called the iPhone that uses Safari, that’s enjoying some success,” Moltzen reports.

MacDailyNews Note: Designed by the Web Standards Project, Acid tests determine whether a web browser complies with emerging Internet standards. Acid 2 tests for compatibility with new features in the HTML, CSS, and PNG standards. Pioneering the standardization effort, Safari passed Acid 2 on October 27, 2005, two-and-a-half years before any other popular browser. Safari is the first — and only — web browser to pass Acid 3. Acid 3 tests a browser’s ability to fully render pages using the web standards used to build dynamic, next-generation websites, including CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SVG.

Moltzen continues, “In and of itself, standards compliance for free software like a browser won’t determine the king of the marketplace. But Microsoft is losing market share on the desktop, and its desktop business actually shrunk during its most recent quarter. Right now it could use all the friends it can get. And in a community critical to the technology industry, its longtime rival Apple now has a big advantage.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Anyone who’s surprised that a Microsoft product is 20% of Apple’s just hasn’t been paying the least bit of attention for the past 3+ decades.