Article by George Norman

On 23 Jan 2009

Now that support for Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 is over, Microsoft is preparing to launch the first Release candidate of Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8 RC1) as soon as next week, and by that I mean Monday, the 26th of January. The information was confirmed by UX and Compatibility Program Manager Frank Olivier earlier this week.

Here is what Frank Olivier said when talking about some rendering problems which users encountered when accessing whitehouse.gov in IE8 on Windows 7 Beta 1 : “This is because the version of IE8 in Windows 7 Beta is somewhat older than the Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate (IE8 RC1) that we're about to release for Windows Vista and Windows XP. Internet Explorer 8 RC1 displays whitehouse.gov correctly - without this menu issue, as does most recent internal Win7 build.”


You might notice that he did not specify an exact date; he just said that IE8 RC1 will drop soon. According to sources inside Microsoft the release date may be just three days away – 01.26.2009. The only problem is that if you are currently testing Windows 7 Beta 1 on your machine, you will not be able to install IE8 RC1. If you are running Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, then you should not have any problems.

Now if you do not particularly care about the Internet Explorer browser and do not want your Windows OS to automatically download it, then Microsoft has provided a blocker tool which you may download here.

Its good to see that Microsoft is putting out IE8 RC1 by the end of January; previous reports stated that the browser would be made available to the general public in the first quarter of 2009, meaning that it could have been pushed back as far as March. Talking about delays, it seems that the release of Vista SP2 has been pushed back and the service pack will allegedly drop in May or June.



Tags: Microsoft, Internet Explorer, IE 8 RC1

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