You’ve probably heard the story: a solo developer spends two years building a browser from scratch, and it passes Acid3 with a perfect 100. It’s a feel-good underdog tale, right? Wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about mistaking nostalgia for progress.
Acid3 was a milestone in 2008. It tested standards compliance for a web that no longer exists. By 2017, even Chrome and Safari had stopped caring about it — the test itself had become outdated. Passing it today is like bragging you can run a 4-minute mile in a race where everyone else is driving a car.
The real question nobody asked: What’s the Speedometer 3.1 score? That’s the modern benchmark — the one that measures how fast a browser handles the complex JavaScript apps we actually use. Gmail. Figma. Notion. The comment thread on the project’s announcement was brutal: one user simply asked, ‘What’s the Speedometer 3.1 rating?’ Silence. Because the answer is probably ‘not good.’
Here’s the hard truth: Passing Acid3 is a vanity metric. It signals that you can implement a set of long-settled specifications, but it says nothing about the hard problems — JIT compiler optimization, security sandboxing, memory management, and the endless edge cases of modern web APIs. Those are the things that make Chrome or Safari actually usable. Those are the things that take teams of hundreds, not one person in a garage.
Look, I admire the grit. Two years of solo work is heroic. But heroism doesn’t ship a product. The browser world doesn’t need another trophy for the shelf — it needs a competitor that can run the web of 2024, not 2008.
And here’s the twist: the project’s own website claims the code is ‘hand-written,’ but the top comment on the HN thread pointed out that the writing style and the nature of the other products on the same site suggest heavy LLM involvement. If you’re going to build a browser, at least be honest about your tools. That kind of disconnect erodes trust even further.
We all want a Firefox revival, a plucky underdog that breaks the Chrome monopoly. But the path to that isn’t ticking a box that lost its meaning a decade ago. It’s shipping a browser that can open 10 tabs without begging for RAM, render WebGL without glitches, and load a React app faster than a user can blink.
So yes, celebrate the effort. But don’t mistake a checkbox for a solution. The browser that matters won’t be the one that aces Acid3 — it’ll be the one that can load your Slack, run your Figma, and not crash when you open a third tab. And that’s still a long way off.
FAQ
Q: Why is Acid3 considered obsolete?
A: Acid3 was designed to test compliance with web standards from the late 2000s. Modern browsers have evolved beyond those specs, and the test itself hasn't been updated since 2011. Passing it today doesn't indicate real-world performance or compatibility with modern web apps.
Q: What should I care about instead of Acid3?
A: Modern benchmarks like Speedometer 3.1 measure JavaScript execution speed and responsiveness — the things that actually matter for everyday browsing. Also look for real-world compatibility with popular sites, security features, and memory efficiency.
Q: Is this solo dev's browser a scam or just misguided?
A: Hard to say — the writing on the project page and the developer's other products seem AI-generated, which raises questions about authenticity. The effort is real, but the focus on a dead benchmark suggests either a lack of modern browser engineering understanding or a marketing strategy that preys on nostalgia.