Apple's latest Webkit rendering engine has steered the Safari 4 beta to fully passing the Acid 3 test, which is becoming the industry standard for testing web, err... standards.

The Acid3 test is generally considered as a benchmark to determine how well a web browser follows web standards and at least as of now, Safari 4 beta is the most compliant browser. To pass the test, a browser has to use default settings, the animation has to be smooth, the score has to end on 100/100, and the final page has to look exactly, pixel by pixel, like the reference rendering. Beta versions of Safari's WebKit and Opera's Presto engines hit the two of the three conditions, a 100/100 score and matching the reference rendering, back in March.

"Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering, we have passed the third condition, smooth animation on reference hardware," WebKit’s Maciej Stachowiak wrote in a blog post today. The test was run on 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro machine.

The WebKit team said that the perfect score is a result of the fast layout engine and optimizations relating to the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript engine, which we described in detail yesterday.