WebKit browser engine aces Acid3 test, stakes claim to No. 1

Those results were:

• WebKit, (r36882) -- 100
• Firefox 3.1, (nightly) -- 89
• Opera 9.6, (RC1) -- 85
• Opera 9.52 -- 84
• Chrome, (0.2.153.1) -- 79
• Safari 3.1.2 -- 75
• Firefox 3.0.3 -- 71
• IE8 (Beta 2) -- 21
• IE7 -- 12

The only other browser maker to stake a claim on Acid3 has been Opera, which said six months ago that a development build of its flagship application had also scored 100 .

In related news, Stachowiak also recently revealed that a major revamp in WebKit's JavaScript engine, dubbed "SquirrelFish Extreme," was more than twice as fast as its predecessor, and over three times faster than the engine included in the current production edition of Safari.

Stachowiak's comments followed similar claims by Mozilla last month, when the company spelled out massive speed gains from its TraceMonkey project . Mozilla plans to add TraceMonkey to the next edition, Firefox 3.1, due to ship sometime later this year or in early 2009.

According to reports, Apple will integrate new builds of WebKit into its Safari 4, which has been seeded to some developers for testing and is expected to publicly launch with Mac OS X 10.6, aka "Snow Leopard," the next version of the company's operating system. Snow Leopard, which Apple has said will ship sometime next year, will focus on stability and performance improvements, rather than on adding more features to the operating system.