Strawman. Acid3 is NOT a test of browser efficiency or performance... it is a test of how well it renders a page designed to international HTML code standards.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript.When successful, the Acid3 test displays a gradually increasing percentage counter with colored rectangles in the background. The percentage displayed is based on the number of sub-tests passed. It is not representing an actual percentage of conformance as the test does not keep track of how many of the tests were actually started (100 is assumed). In addition to these the browser also has to render the page exactly like the reference page is rendered in the same browser. Like the text of the Acid2 test, the text of the reference rendering is not a bitmap, in order to allow for certain differences in font rendering.
Acid3 was in development from April 2007,[1] and released on 3 March 2008.[2] The main developer was Ian Hickson, who also wrote the Acid2 test. Acid2 focused primarily on Cascading Style Sheets, but this third Acid test focuses also on technologies used on modern, highly interactive websites characteristic of Web 2.0, such as ECMAScript and DOM Level 2. A few tests also concern Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XML and data: URIs. It includes several elements from W3C CSS3 working drafts that have not made it to candidate recommendations yet.
Internet Explorer 8 scored only 20 out of 100.
Strawman is right. In my eyes acid3 is meaningless. You heard correctly, I said meaningless. Web 2.0 and all that is bells and whistles and meaningless window dressing that maybe matters to HTML/XML and CSS and Java graphic designer geeks. Who cares if a browser can do that . I am more concerned with REAL WORLD performance. Again acid3 means nothing in regard to REAL performance.