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Acid3 seems to be the ultimate pipe dream. It could be 5-10 years before the majority of Internet users are using browsers that pass it.

Maybe the version of IE released with Windows 7 will pass (IE 9?), but there are still people using IE 6 on Windows 2000, 7 years after IE 6's release (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Version_6) and 8 years after Windows 2000's release (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#History).

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Acid 3 doesn't have to make IE fully compliant in this or the next decade to be a good influence. It's bringing the non-IE browsers into line remarkably quickly, which means web developers can concentrate on IE. And from the large (though insufficient) improvements from IE 5 to 7, we can see that Microsoft is actually responding to the competition -- slowly, of course, but surely faster than if every other browser were as quirky as theirs.

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