Thomas Much's Weblog

Acid2 - the truth about Safari, iCab and Konqueror

The latest Mac OS X update (10.4.3) contains a new Safari version 2.0.2 that passes the Acid2 test (if you're not sure what this test is all about, take the guided tour). This has raised some interest in the media if and when other browsers will pass this test, too. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of misconception about the winner and the runners-up. So, here's the truth about the Acid2 race.

Fact 1

• On 2005-04-27 Apple's Safari was the first browser that successfully passed the Acid2 test, but it was an Apple internal version only.
• On 2005-05-18, an internal iCab version passed the test, too, and was available to registered users on 2005-05-20 - second place! A public preview was released on 2005-06-06.
• Konqueror passed the test on 2005-06-04 and was available as a nightly build almost instantly - third place.

Later on, nightly builds of Safari became available here, and on 2005-10-31 Safari was the first officially released Acid2 compliant browser. The initiatiors of the test race, webstandards.org, have published the official results here and here.

Fact 2

iCab uses its own rendering engine and is not based on KHTML - in contrast to Apple's WebKit, which is based on KHTML. This way, the developers of Konqueror could use some of Apple's Acid2 fixes. The code that enabled iCab to pass the Acid2 test was written completely by Alexander Clauss.