The Acid2 Browser Test is out, and any fears that it’s focused only on IE have proven unfounded. As Dave Hyatt remarks in his efforts to get it to work in Safari, “Every browser fails it spectacularly.”

The Acid2 test is a single page of HTML and CSS designed to use parts of the spec that today’s browsers handle incorrectly or not at all. According to the rules, the code should display a happy face… but at the moment it produced varying levels of gibberish. So far Firefox seems to handle it the least badly (I hesitate to say “best”), with Opera and Konqueror at about the same level (you can at least see a circular outline), and Internet Explorer looking like a piece of modern art.

Well, we know Safari is working on it (and the fixes should feed back into Konqueror). One of the test’s architects is high up at Opera, so you can bet they will be improving. I imagine people are already submitting bug reports to Mozilla. [Update: found the tracking bug in Bugzilla.] That leaves Internet Explorer. They’ve been notoriously reluctant to update their rendering engine, but they did ask for specific requests. I don’t have much confidence in seeing fixes in IE 7, but you never know…

Anyone want to place bets on who progresses the fastest?

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