What is Acid3 test?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call œweb standards, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. The link to official website is here.
Who need it and why we need it?
As a webmaster and designer you need to know which browsers are standard. Testing your website with sub standard browser obviously will be error prone.
As a user, you obviously should use the best browser available.
How the tests are done?
You can read in the official website (link given above) as well as in 
Can I test myself?
Of course! Just click this link in your browser and the browser will be tested. Disable Addons, which might interfere and enable JavaScript.
What are the scores?
We tested the following browsers with Windows 7 Retail with SP1 with all the updates installed on a top notch HP laptop and MacBook Pro. The variation (if any) are mentioned below:
Layout Engine —Browser Name ————Versions———————- Acid3 Score
Webkit ———— Google Chrome (Passed)—–11.0.696.68———————-100/100
Webkit ———— Safari (Passed)—————–5.0.5 ——————————100/100
Presto ———— Opera (Passed) —————- 11.11 ——————————100/100
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Gecko ————-Mozilla Firefox (Failed) —— 4.0.1 —————————– 96/100 -Windows 7, 95 /100 -Mac OS X
Trident 5.0 —— Internet Explorer (Failed) — IE9; 9.0.8112.16421 ———- 95/100 (No test on Mac; IE 8 scored 20/100)
Our Recommendation
Browsers those can render any standard webpage effectively in Windows 7 : Google Chrome , Safari or Opera. Personally we are inclined towards Opera.
Browsers those can render webpages any standard webpage effectively in Mac OS X : Safari, Opera or Google Chrome. Our pick is Safari.
You can do your daily works with Mozilla Firefox 6.0.2 as well on any OS as it supports lot of addons.
Remarks
Internet Explorer 9 has done a good job. Score was mere 20 with IE 8. Practically now IE9 renders the webpages faster than Mozilla Firefox (if it is W3C validated). We could not test IE9 on Mac OS X.
With more advanced plugins (extensions) available with Opera; developers might think to develop more and more plugins / extensions for Opera. Opera can load pages with very weak Internet connection speed with its Presto engine.
Mozilla Firefox is facing problem because of its complex methods of getting a customized skin that fits well with Windows 7 or Mac OS (versus Opera’s one click theme installation), more and more tools are becoming available for both Opera and Chrome. Also, many user did not liked the copied features of Opera browser.
From our visitor data; a big percentage has been shifted towards Google Chrome, we presume, leaving Firefox. Opera and Safari’s market share has remained almost the same.
Winner
Opera and Safari has remained a winner, this time Google Chrome is the co-winner with its increasing market share.
