> 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."
?? 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.