Please help an ignorant fella out:
Is Acid2 pass/fail only, or do you get a score? If you get a score, how did IE7 beta compare with firefox, opera, and even IE6?

All I've seen is a bunch of articles saying it fails the test, but nothing anywhere showing whether the test can be used as anything more than a pass/fail metric.

It's pass/fail... take a look for yourself:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

Take the test with each browser and make your own judgement.  Some browsers do better than others, but even though Firefox doesn't quite manage the whole thing, if you compare it to IE6 or 7 you will see that it misses by a SIGNIFICANT margin.

I suppose you could count all the squares and work out a percentage score, but it's probably not worth it. IE doesn't just mess it up a bit, it pretty much gets every single thing "wrong"...

That's hilarious. Everyone's freaking out because IE7 won't pass Acid2, yet Firefox doesn't pass it.

It's a whole different degree of "not passing" though. Firefox gets maybe 95%, IE gets closer to 0%...

...And Firefox developers are actively working on passing test -- Microsoft has dismissed it.

It should be noted that CSS fixes are still being implemented in IE7. The final product will no doubt do a better job than the current beta.

IMO, though, its unlikely that it will do any better than FireFox.

Serious question: At this point, why does Microsoft care about owning the browser market? Why not just create a simple wrapper KHTML and let other vendors do the hard work?

I know all of the easy answers to that, but I'm not sure how well they all hold, as I can think of pretty good counter arguments to all of them.

As we discussed last week, backwards compatability is a big deal at MS. MS dont want to break existing web apps that use IE specific features.