To gauge memory use, I loaded four sites: CNN, Net¬vibes, PC World, and Yahoo Mail. And to check for possi¬ble memory leaks, I left each of those pages up for an hour. Firefox 3 used the least memory: 81MB to start and 85MB after an hour, ver¬sus Safari 3.1 's 94MB and 95MB. It's unwise to put much stock in performance tests for an early beta, but IE 8 Beta 1 used 114MB at start and 118MB after an hour.

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I also ran each browser through a set of standards¬compliance tests formulated by the Web Standards Proj¬ect. Safari 3.1 passed the so¬called Acid2 test and earned top marks on the forward¬looking Acid3 test-which gauges a browser's ability to use technology available for Web 2.0-rich sites-with a score of 75 out of 100. Firefox 3 also passed Acid2, and its beta 5 release scored 71 out of 100 on Acid3. IE 7 did not pass Acid2, but beta 1 of IE 8 did. Microsoft reports