SerenityOS Web Browser passes Acid3 Test
The "love letter to '90s user interfaces" is quickly becoming a usable daily driver operating system.
Until midnight on March 31st, subscriptions to The Lunduke Journal are 70% off. Want to support one of the most independent tech publications on planet earth and get some amazing freebies in the process (including multiple books of nerdy satire)? Chop chop.
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:
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.”:
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.
Seriously. Until midnight on March 31st, subscriptions to The Lunduke Journal are 70% off.
That’ll get you a mountain of free eBooks, exclusive articles, podcast episodes… the works. Plus this:
I would love to daily drive Serenity, but it has no real hardware support to speak of and I am most definitely not a driver developer.