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I decided to take another look at how the latest browsers are rendering the Acid 2 test (I’ll explain this test later). The last time I looked, none of them rendered it properly. Microsoft’s IE still does the worst job (I tested IE 7 beta 3), but it’s better than it was in IE 6. Firefox is looking pretty close, so they must be working on it. Opera’s browser renders it perfectly, except when you shrink the window really small, which causes part of the smiley face to mysteriously jump up above the rest of the face. I’m actually pretty excited about this, even though IE 7 still does a horrible job. I can see that all three major vendors are making progress towards standards compliance, which makes me happy. :DIf you are wondering what the heck I’m talking about, the Acid 2 test is a reference page that will only show the pretty smiley face if the browser follows all the latest CSS , XHTML and other Internet standards correctly. The test page was created by Opera, but was intended as a challenge for all the major browser vendors. The test was originally announced in early 2005, but Opera is the first of the big 3 to ‘finish the race’ with version 9 of their browser. Apparently Safari (officially the 1st), Konqueror all support Acid2, as well as the latest development builds of Firefox 2. Yipee! 🙂 There was an original Acid test back in the late 90’s, and that page eventually rendered correctly in all the major browsers of the time. But since then Microsoft gained a monopoly in the web browser space, and web standards have largely been ignored by most web developers (because Microsoft stopped developing IE, and thus stopped trying to follow the standards). Note: I no longer believe that IE has a monopoly, as most of the stat’s I’ve seen show them at around 85% market share. There were times when IE had over 95%, and that is what I’d call a monopoly.