Mozilla has responded to complaints that Firefox 4 is not scoring 100/100 points in Ian Hickson’s Acid 3 web standard compliance test. Firefox 4 stands at 97/100 and is unlikely to improve its score.

Alexander Limi, GUI designer at Mozilla, has spent some time explaining the conversation about Firefox and the Acid 3 test and noted that the browser will not hit a perfect score of 100 and that is, in fact, ok with Mozilla. He pointed to a comment of Mozilla engineer Boris Zbarsky on Slashdot, stressing that the missing 3 points relate to SVG fonts. ” We don’t particularly want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3),” Limi wrote.

Instead, Mozilla focuses on the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), especially since SVG fonts have been dropped as a core element of the SVG standard. It appears to be a reasonable decision Mozilla’s part (at least as far as Firefox 4 is concerned) and simply a sign that the Acid 3 test needs an update.

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