Although W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has been around since 2000, it is only recently that good support for SVG has been provided directly by the browsers.

The Adobe SVG plugin was made available quite early on in the life of SVG and gave excellent support for most features of SVG including animation. It could be used with the main browsers available at the time. Adobe announced that it would discontinue support for the Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009. As a result support for SVG is now mainly dependent on the quality of the browser's own support for SVG. However, it is still possible to download the Adobe plugin.

Significant developments are taking place in all the main browsers as they move towards support for SVG and HTML5. In consequence, any comments on the relative performance of the various browsers is likely to change over time.

The WWW Conference Series Logo animations are particularly demanding as they require good synchronization between the SVG animation and the accompanying soundtrack. The Adobe plugin supported an audio element that provided that synchronization within SVG. Modern browsers currently rely on the ability to synchronize an HTML5 audio element with its rendering of the SVG animation.

The harness provided here will provide good synchronization on most modern browsers.

Some comments on the individual browsers are:

Chrome
Currently the best browser support on a PC running Vista or XP. Only renders the complete animation smoothly on a fast modern PC.
Safari
Currently the best browser support on a Mac running OS X.
Opera
Somewhat behind the performance of Chrome and Safari and only supports ogg soundtracks. Some computers seem to run the animation better if you reload the page after it starts initially.
Firefox
Similar performance to Opera but currently under heavy development in the animation area and some features do not work at all. May be worth looking at the latest Firefox Alpha.
IE8/9
Currently does not provide native support for SVG animation. It still provides very good SVG animation support via the Adobe SVG plugin.