14 DAY TRIAL // On January 26, 2009, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, revealed, as Microsoft was launching the Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 8, that the latest development milestone of the browser was platform complete. As the Redmond company is getting closer and closer to releasing IE8 to web, changes to the browser are now limited to dealing with eventual regression bugs and to softening any rough edges of the product. Still, as of RC, IE8 is very close to RTW stage, in a context in which the browser's level of compatibility, interoperability and standards support has evolved compared to the Beta 2 release.
“It takes time for web developers, designers, and IT professionals to migrate a site to an updated browser. Yet our mutual customers expect the web to look and feel the same after they install the latest IE version. We’ve built Compat View and IE7 Standards Mode to ease migration and allow web developers and designers to opt-in to IE7’s behavior while they upgrade their site. Since Beta 2 we’ve improved IE7 Standards Mode fit-and-finish such that RC1 is very close to the real IE7 web platform,” revealed Marc Silbey, IE Program Manager.
When it comes down to the implementation of CSS 2.1, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 manages to pass twice the number of tests that Beta 2 aced. Microsoft in fact applauded IE8 RC1 for having the most complete CSS 2.1 implementation on the market, passing all the tests associated with the implementation. The software giant explained that developers building content with CSS 2.1 would be able to see it work seamlessly across all browsers that fully support the standard, and not just in IE8.
At the same time, RC1 brings enhancements associated with HTML, Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. “The Release Candidate includes the following updates: mutable DOM Prototype includes the new ECMAScript 3.1 conformant getter/setter syntax; ARIA supports the dash syntax 'aria-checked' across all IE8 document modes; Cross-Domain Requests (XDR) now checks Access-Control-Allow-Origin header for a match to the origin URL as well as wildcards. As a result, data is only shared with sites whose origin the server specifies,” Silbey added.
Microsoft has also tweaked the performance of the browser. Silbey indicated that, for IE8 RC1, the software giant optimized common AJAX design patterns, and that the browser would be able to notice consistent performance improvements in comparison to the Beta 2 release.
“Beta 2 introduced more power with the JavaScript profiler, save to file, and console.log support. RC1 has dramatically improved stability and a much more accurate view of the HTML tree and CSS tracing. It also offers more flexibility by adding a menu option for viewing source with Notepad, the built-in viewer, or any other choice of viewer,” Silbey said.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for download here.