Microsoft has released RC 1 for IE 8. You can find it here. I had installed IE 8 Beta on my Windows XP box and played around with it. I was having multiple issues - one being that it was pretty slow and other being that many sites were not compatible with IE 8. But major was that it used to crash often.
Some of the features of IE 8 which I like are WebSlices, InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, Compatibility View, Caret Browsing and Tab Grouping. One other feature is adding headers within the Sites, based on which automatically the Compatibility View is triggered and the site which normally would not have been viewable properly in IE 8 is displayed within IE 8. The Compatibility view emulates IE 7 for those pages which have the following added header:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
WebSite Admins can set full site to be IE7 compatible for IE8 viewing by adding new header with name="X-UA-Compatible" and value="IE=EmulateIE7".
All these features have been maintained with the release of RC1. Areas where I could immediately see the difference were the speed and stability which is way better than on Beta 1. This was anticipated as RC1 is usually much better in many aspects than Beta 1.
Head on to Microsoft and download Internet Explorer 8 (Release Candidate 1)
