Windows 7 - Public likely getting IE8 RC1 next week

Microsoft handed out IE8 Beta 2 in August 2008 and is now finally getting ready to release another public build of IE7's successor sometime next week. This will be the official Release Candidate 1 (RC1) build, according to a post on the IEBlog, which describes why the latest public build does not render Barack Obama's new home on the Web correctly:

If you open the newly redesigned whitehouse.gov in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 Beta, you'll notice that the dropdown menus don't hide correctly when you hover over other menu items. 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 Windows 7 build.

Full Story: http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2009/01/22/public-likely-getting-ie8-rc1-next-week

Thanks very much for the news. Will look into that.

Thanks, Slimy. Will try it out, but will probably stick with FF.

Gary

Good find!

Good find!

I really like alot of the features and stuff in IE8. I decided to give it a try after I installed build 7000, because before I had simply immediately installed Chrome, Firefox, and Opera(yea I'm like the uber browser man, I subsequently installed safari and maxthon too =P). I've used mainly Opera since the 90s, but I'm running Chrome as default on 7, because of both rendering speed and app speed. But I gave IE8 a swing and I actually liked quite a bit of it. The distribution of tabs as separate windows on the taskbar is definitely a nice touch. Aero peek makes me wish there were a similar feature for tabs in browsers.

I just wish IE8 were prettier. It just looks kinda ugly to me =P

Y'all know that this release isn't meant to be used on win 7.