Microsoft made the release candidate of Internet Explorer 8, the next version of its popular web browser, available for download midday Monday. This is the last stage for the browser before it's finalized, and few significant changes have been made since its last release.
Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 can now be downloaded from Microsoft's website. The free browser is available for users of Windows Vista, Windows Server and Windows XP Service Pack 2. Older Windows versions aren't supported.
Also, this version of IE8 will not run on current versions of Windows 7 — either the public beta released Jan. 10 or the pre-beta version handed out to developers last October. The final version, due in a few months, will be the default browser in Windows 7.
All users running a supported operating system who have downloaded any of the previous public betas of IE8 will eventually be prompted to update their browsers if they don't want to update manually.
This release is billed as a release candidate, meaning it's in the stage between beta and a final release. It's what Microsoft refers to as "platform-complete" — you can expect the final IE8 browser to behave like this one does. Microsoft will be on the lookout for critical issues, however. (For more technical details, see our recent overview of IE8's development.)
It also means that you won't see a whole lot of new features in the user interface or the chrome, compared to the beta releases.
We spoke with Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for IE, about the changes in RC1, and he told us that the new stuff is "mostly polish at this point." Probably the biggest visual change is in the favorites bar, where users can choose an icon-only view to fit more items into the bar. His team has instead been concentrating on reliability and compatibility. He also noted that early testers have commented on IE8 RC1's improved performance.
Hachamovitch also says his crew has been paying particular attention to how everyday users interact with the web — searching, sending e-mail and sharing media — and simplifying those interactions. He talks more about this on the IE8 blog.
As browsers continue to mature, he says, they've taken a lot of the dirty work out of manually stitching together the various web services you use to communicate, stay secure, keep on top of news, and share links and other media with your friends.
"With the final release of IE8, people's expectations of what a web browser does are going to go up a lot," he says.
And he's right ... as long as those people aren't already using Firefox.
As we noted when we got our first peek at the new IE8 last year, some of its new features broke new ground in the browser race, but most of them were attempts to catch up to innovations made by Microsoft's competitors — search in the location bar, smart RSS handling and easy-to-understand security protections.
But IE still attracts the lion's share of mainstream web users, thanks to the fact it comes bundled with Windows. And for those users, IE8 should improve their experience interacting with web apps, RSS and all of the other tech more-advanced users consider second nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment