SerenityOS Web Browser passes Acid3 Test

The "love letter to '90s user interfaces" is quickly becoming a usable daily driver operating system.

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This is incredibly cool.

The SerenityOS project, run by Andreas Kling, has built its own web browser.

To be clear: This is a from scratch web browser. Not based on Chrome or Firefox. One of the only “we built the whole gosh darned thing” modern browsers currently being built and worked on.

And that browser has just hit an absolutely mammoth milestone: It now fully passes the Acid3 test. Check out this tweet from Kling:

Andreas Kling @awesomekling

The SerenityOS Browser now passes the Acid3 test! 🥳🐞🌍 AFAIK we're the first new open source browser to reach this milestone since the test originally came out. This has been a team effort over the last couple of weeks, and I'm so proud of everyone who contributed! 🤓❤️

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

The Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript.

Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t still work to do in order to make the SerenityOS Browser fully usable on “The Modern Web(tm)”. As Andreas Kling puts it, “There’s still a long way to go.”:

Andreas Kling @awesomekling

@pepijndevos There's still a long way to go before it's usable for daily browsing. For example we need to improve support for flexbox, grid and table layouts. Performance also needs work. 🤓 Our JavaScript engine is decently mature, test262 score tracked here: libjs.dev/test262/

libjs.devLibJS test262 results

Just the same, this is downright impressive. And shows a tremendous amount of maturity from the SerenityOS project, which describes itself thusly:

SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.

This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.

SerenityOS is quickly becoming a system worth keeping an eye on. I’ll be honest, this operating system is very, very close to being capable of being a daily driver for myself. Which, considering the relative age of the system, is mind blowing.

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