I had a funny feeling this was a post from you. Acid3 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be as far as determining browser efficiency or performance. Since it is evaluating web standards there is a lot of Javascript testing. If the websites you frequent don’t use javascript there will be a skewed rating. Honestly in real world usage the numbers aren’t that different between IE8 and Safari. Hell the newest Safari 3.3.3 or whatever the Windows version is, talk about bloatware. The package is like 104MBs!!!! I though IE8.0 was bloatware and that is at something svelt in comparison at less than 20MB. Worse yet is Apple is slick with the try to trick you into installing iTunes or the Iupdater BS.
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.
Business web applications (both internal to the business and exposed on the external web) do a LOT of javascript, particularly when doing Ajax.
Safari for Windows has to bring with it everything it needs to work. IE8 uses already-installed Windows libraries. Notice the download size gets bigger as you go from Vista to XP, as it has to bring more functionality with it that is not built into the OS. That said, Safari 3.2.2 for Windows is 19 MB while IE8 for XP is 16 MB, not as much of a difference as you stated. IE8 64-bit for XP is 32 MB, a bit more than Safari 4 for 64-bit Mac.
Worse yet is Apple is slick with the try to trick you into installing iTunes or the Iupdater BS.
It reminds me of Microsoft constantly trying to get you to install Silverlight. I don't like it either.