Digital Prank

Released in last March, Internet Explorer 8 today has come out of beta as first Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for the Microsoft Windows users undergoing the final testing. Microsoft claims Internet Explorer 8 has come up with some new innovative features which makes browsing experience faster, easier, and safer. Today Microsoft made it official and released IE8 Release Candidate1 in 25 languages and made it available Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server and with the binary Mac missing. Read the official announcement by Microsoft in IEBlog.

Microsoft by releasing IE8 RC1 tries to regain the lost control in the browser market to Mozilla and other browsers. Microsoft hopes IE 8 to be a success as IE 7 flopped and pushed back in the race to dominance.

Please see the excerpt from IEBlog

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.

I have listed some of the some of the interesting features of IE8 RC1

Compatibility View - Internet Explorer 8 allows the users to add  list of common Web sites developed for previous versions to be viewed in Compatibility View mode to render properly. Also Microsoft has listed down known sites that requires compatibility mode which users can make use of instead of making their own. IE8 beta doesn’t have this option and had an special torn icon to view it in the compatibility mode.

IE Suggested sites – Internet Explorer 8 helps you find new websites that are interesting and relevant to you through Suggested sites.

Web Slices – allows users to connect to a website by subscribing to content directly within a webpage on that website. It helps one to keep up with frequently updated sites receiving updates constantly from the new Internet Explorer 8 Favorites Bar without having to repeatedly visit sites to check for updates or new information.

InPrivate Filtering – InPrivate Browsing from IE8 beta has been divided into InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering as shown in the menu above. InPrivate browsing prevents the browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies and usernames/passwords from being stored or retained by the browser locally, leaving virtually no evidence of the user’s browsing or search history. InPrivate Filtering puts a block over websites or content providers who are collecting information about your browsing habits. This prevents third parties aggregating data to build a profile of you based on your web surfing activity without notifying you.

Read IE 8 RC1 features to know about more about this release. Also I have found a post in IEBlog for upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 RC1.

The release seems to be a cool and competitive one for me but it is too early predict and lets wait for sometime.