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At Microsoft’s IEBlog, Dean Hachamovitch announces that an Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate is now available:
We’re excited to make the IE8 Release Candidate available today for public download today in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please download it now and try it out. We welcome your feedback!
What’s New
The team will post more about all changes between Beta 2 and RC. In brief:
- Platform Complete. The technical community should expect the final IE8 release to behave as the Release Candidate does. The IE8 product is effectively complete and done. We’ll post separately about the thousands of additional test cases we’re contributing to the W3C. We’ve listened very carefully to feedback from the betas. With the Release Candidate, we’re listening carefully for critical issues.
- Reliability, Performance, and Compatibility improvements. We’ve studied the telemetry feedback about the browser’s underlying quality and addressed many issues.
- Security. We’ve worked closely with people in the security community to enable consumer-ready clickjacking protection. Sites can now protect themselves and their users from clickjacking attacks “out of the box,” without impacting compatibility or requiring browser add-ons. We also made some changes to InPrivate based on feedback from customers and partners.
So when does the final version arrive? There’s no final word other than Microsoft won’t ship it before it is ready, but Hachamovitch says that they will only be fixing the most critical issues before now and shipment.
And how about standards compliance issues which have continually dogged Internet Explorer and IE8? There seem to be definite improvements but IE8 still doesn’t pass the ACID test.
