Webkit, Apple’s open source engine for Safari and many other browsers, has recently found a bug in the ACID3 test.  ACID3 is the newest web standards test certified in part by the W3.  After the bug was fixed in the ACID3 test, Webkit suddenly got a perfect score of 100/100.  When I retried Firefox/Gekko, I was kind of surprised that the score actually went down one point to 67/100 (Last time I tested it, it had a 68/100).  Opera’s newest engine, then scored a 100/100 as well along with Webkit.  Although this version of Opera is not released yet, and should be in a week or so.

It seems to me that Apple is finely becoming a worthy competitor to IE, Firefox, and Opera.  At this point Mozilla has a lot of work to do to catch up,  Webkit is still the only publicly released engine with HTML5.  As with IE, it’s no competition at this point, it’s most important feature is updating Windows for now.

Now before I begin, just to clarify, because I see this mistake many times. Astrology and Astronomy are completely different subjects, Astrology is a false science that uses patterns in the sky to tell your future.

For a long time now, I’ve been telling people that the market share graphs and surveys are false; it seems very few believed me. The reason I said that had to do with the fact of how market share information was gathered. You see, a company like Net Applications has a snippet of code that is put into hundreds of Web sites. The code can tell what computer the visitors are on, and then send that information back to Net Applications.

The bad thing about these types of invisible surveys has to do with the Web sites themselves. From what I’ve learned most of Net Application’s Web sites are on e-commerce sites. At this time there are still many e-commerce sites devoted to Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft. One of which was Wal-mart’s online music store (which is gone now). You see Net Applications doesn’t list the Web sites its code is on, so you don’t know if any Web site is biased toward an OS or works better on a specific browser, or tends to get more of a specific OS because of what they sell.

Well now today I’ve found proof of how unreliable this method is. I found another Web site, which I trust a lot more than New Applications, called w3schools.com (W3 is the consortium that creates the open Internet standards).

Here’s a comparison:

So as you can see, there are some big differences, and actually W3 and Net Applications can’t seem to agree on any of the browsers. Firefox for instance seems to have more than twice the market share on W3’s side compared to Net Application’s.

This statement above can reflect on another similar market share Net Application does — the one that everyone seems to base their facts upon: The Operating System Marketshare. This has the same results as above. W3 actually says that Linux has a market share that is over five times the amount Net Applications says (3.6 > 0.67). So what does this say about Vista? Well, let’s look at Apple’s share. Net Applications says there are roughly 8% of computer users on Macs. Steve Jobs commented a while back that there are 23 million Mac OS X users. Estimating, I believe it is close to 26 million today. So what does that say? In total it appears that there are only about 320 computer users in the entire world. 320! that’s impossible — that’s less than 100 million over the population of the United States, so what about the rest of the world? I remember Microsoft claiming that there are close to a billion computer users out there, but then where did they go? I then did the same thing with W3’s information and got double the users at around 650 million. So who’s right? Are they both wrong? Who knows?

So once again, do listen about who has a larger market share, it’s all just a pseudoscience.

• W3 Browser Statistics

• Net Applications Browser Statistics