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Scott Hanselman presents the following article on getting a machine up to speed for Web Development.

There’s a new site at http://www.microsoft.com/web and a new (beta) of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (blog announcement). It’s basically a super bootstrapper that keeps track of where to get stuff and organizes them as profiles.

If I select “Your Choice” I get a complete list from a catalog of things that can be downloaded. I can auto-select options from a dropdown like “PHP Developer” or “Classic ASP Developer.” Cool that those options are there as well as ASP.NET Developer. There’s a manifest that it downloads to get the latest versions of each of these.

On the Web Server tab, it’ll pick the right IIS modules you’d need to get a site up, but it also shows as options some of the more interesting (and not well publicized) modules like ARR and BitRate Throttling that have been released since IIS7 came out.

If you’re running a Web Development shop, it’s certainly a quick way to get everything you’d need installed, including the free version of Visual Studio Web Express.

Check it out, and if you have any trouble or find anything interesting, you can report it directly to the team at the Web Platform Installer Forum. If you like it or hate it, let them now. It’d be interesting to see how extensible it can be and if they choose to extend it other developer products.

The Acid test,  tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. Acid2 tests a variety of web standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Harrison Hoffman, co-founder of LiveSide.net and contributor to the CNET Blog Network is reporting that Google’s Chrome browser is outperforming the latest “stable” builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. All the browsers tested pass the Acid2 test. However, the only currently released browser to beat Google’s Chrome browser was Opera, which scored an 83. FireFox scored 71 and IE scored 14, whereas Google’s Chrome (which is still beta) hits a 78 out of 100.

Developer builds however, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100) do beat out Chrome.

Read the full details over at CNET.