The last few days there was some hyping on Opera passing the Acid3 test before WebKit, which was very close with their nightly builds. However Microsoft and Mozilla have been quiet, as both won't pass it anyway with their latest beta releases. But does it really matter anyway?

Not intended to bring down the efforts of the developers, but there is simply no need to hype that Opera defeated the WebKit team by passing the Acid3 test sooner. In fact, I don't think it even qualifies as the build was not public at that time, while WebKit was.

But does it matter anyway? Who cares about Acid3? You, me, and other web developers. But what is it exactly? Perhaps it should be compared with the PC benchmark program like FutureMark's 3D Mark. This popular benchmark tool to test hardware performance, is simply put a synthetic benchmark. Yes, it does use a real technology like Direct X, but when compared to (real) games, it seems that the graphics are poor and the performance is bad when compared to highly optimized engines like the Unreal 3 engine or the CryEngine 2. Will anyone use a combination of Web 2.0 technologies used in Acid 3 while the majority (IE, Firefox) users can't use it? Nope, don't think so, just look at the real world influence of Acid2, which isn't passed by IE or Firefox either.

Thus, it's nice to know but it doesn't change the mind of a normal end user to use either Opera or Safari which passes Acid 3, while this is an important factor for any web browser. I mean, browser usage still equals lots of (needed) profit, doesn't it? Most importantly is that any of the browsers simply does what the end user wants. Offer compelling features, security, stability and render their favorite web sites correctly. Let's put it blunt, I care more about Mozilla having reduced Firefox 3's memory footprint and rendering performance right now, than being able to pass Acid3 completely ;)