It clearly can't be random if four other major browser vendors independently score over 90%, and if:
Firefox 2, a browser released in 2006 and predates Acid 3, scores a 52/100 versus the current IE9 score of 32/100.
The only possible explanations are either a) it's an insidious and well organized campaign to unfairly discredit IE, or b) IE, even unreleased IE9, is way behind everybody.
No matter which you believe, random is not an option.
Sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here.
By "random features" I mean that the features chosen are fairly arbitrary in nature, taken from arbitrary sections of a fairly arbitrary selection of standards. That's what makes the Acid3 test different from the Acid1 and Acid2 tests which were rather more specific in what they tested (i.e. CSS), something which is much more fundamental to the web than anything Acid3 tests.
Also, the Acid tests are deliberately constructed with browser bugs in mind. That's why IE fails it incredibly badly since it's been designed to make IE fail incredibly badly. There's no conspiracy when the entire point of the test is that it reveals browser bugs.
That said, Microsoft are behind everybody else, and no-one has said otherwise. However, given inherent limited resources, I'm not sure if I'd rather Microsoft focus on passing Acid3 than improving other aspects of their browser. Given the choice between good CSS3 support and Canvas or SVG Fonts and SMIL I'd prefer the prior pair, and I'm sure many of their users would gladly choose improved performance and stability over web standards.
My point was simply that describing the tests as random or arbitrary diminishes the value of the results without requiring an alternate viewpoint. That would be fair if it were truly random, but I don't think it is.
Edit: Your last edit provides the alternate viewpoint. Your position seems to be more that the attention is misguided, not random.
> It clearly can't be random if four other major browser vendors independently score over 90%
?? The other browser makers score well on ACID3 because they've been developing and bugfixing to ACID3 as a benchmark. It's not random, it's a tautology.
IE9 hasn't been released yet; or did you mean, a super early preliminary build in the early stages of IE9 development which probably has little to do with how the final product will look like? We haven't even shipped a developer preview release yet ...
"IE8 scores 20/100, which is still much worse than all relevant competitors in their versions from the test's release, and has some problems with rendering the Acid3 test page."
It clearly can't be random if four other major browser vendors independently score over 90%, and if:
Firefox 2, a browser released in 2006 and predates Acid 3, scores a 52/100 versus the current IE9 score of 32/100.
The only possible explanations are either a) it's an insidious and well organized campaign to unfairly discredit IE, or b) IE, even unreleased IE9, is way behind everybody.
No matter which you believe, random is not an option.