Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer Team, has announced in MIX09 the availability of Internet Explorer 8. Windows users can now download and install the final version here.

Internet Explorer 8, Release Candidate 1 (aka “IE8 RC1”) has just been released for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows Server 2008 (64-bit, too). However, the RC will not be available for download by Windows 7 Beta testers because IE8 already ships with the Windows 7 Beta OS.

If you’re still running IE7, the high-level changes you’ll notice in the new IE8 include increased speed, increased responsiveness, and overall improved stability. However, it’s the new features like Accelerators and Web Slices that are getting the most attention.

Check it out here.

Early this year Microsoft made a promise that let everyone with full hopes for six months, specially the entire web standards community. Regarding the new Internet Explorer 8, they said that it will “use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default.”.

Well, now that the beta is out, we are now finally able to check for living proof. And, sadly, may pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. Microsoft kept this option hidden deep in the Configuration Panel, under “compatibility View”. You can see that the option “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” is checked by default, thus leaving the standards View clearly away from promises made…

As you all probably know, Internet explorer Beta 2 will be available in August, and with it, probably some new development issues that developers shoud be prepared for.

Every new browser version release comes filled with changes destined to improve compliance and (supposedly) make it more meaningfull. The problem is, some websites of today might experience problems with this new release.

Well, apparently Microsoft added a new feature in internet explorer that allows you to specify wich version of IE is your application targeting. With this information, upcoming versions of Internet Explorer will be able to validate and render it acoordingly to the specified version.

To do so, add the following meta tag to the head of your pages. This tag will tell future versions of IE that your pages were designed for IE7.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

This way it will know that the page should be rendered like IE 7.