IE8 RC1 available on Microsoft Connect

[TimPrice]

UPDATE:
IE8 RC1 PUBLIC for everybody

download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...nfamily/ie/ie8



OLD NEWS:
Log In https://connect.microsoft.com/IE

no major changes for everyday people
hope won't be crash friendly like beta 2, no issues so far


http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1760



New IE8 Build Available for Tech Beta Participants:
12/10/2008 IE8 Partner Build - Windows Vista x64 (ENU) 8.0.6001.18343

IE8 Partner Build Readme
Wednesday December 10th, 2008
Versions:
Windows Vista x86
Windows Vista x64
Windows XP x86
Windows XP x64
The builds are only available in English

Changes since Beta 2
The following are changes since Beta 2 that will appear in the IE8 December Partner Build.

Accessibility-ARIA:
ARIA attribute names containing dashes, such as “aria-checked”, no longer have to be referenced by their camelCased equivalent (ariaChecked) in IE 7 Mode and Quirks Mode. As a consequence of this change, the camelCased syntax no longer exists for these attributes.
For more information regarding ARIA please see W3C’s ARIA Support.

AJAX-XDR:
XDR now checks Access-Control-Allow-Origin header for specific URLs as well as wildcards.
For more information regarding AJAX, please see Updates for AJAX in IE8 Beta 2 and Better AJAX Development.

Developer Tools:
The Developer Tools now has a menu option to let the user choose the view source app. In IE7 the only choice was Notepad and in IE8 Beta 2, the built-in viewer was the only choice. Now users can choose Notepad, built-in viewer, or another application.
For more information please see Introducing the IE8 Developer Tools JScript Profiler, Developer Tools in Internet Explorer Beta 2 and Developer Tools in the Readiness Toolkit.

CSS:
Syntactically valid filter declarations are applied in standards mode, even if unquoted
Starting with IE8 Beta 1, the following filter declaration was not applied in standards mode:
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80, FinishOpacity=70, Style=2);
Instead, IE8 standards mode required the following declaration:
-ms-filter: “progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80, FinishOpacity=70, Style=2)”;
For web applications supporting both IE7 and earlier as well as IE8 standards mode, this meant maintaining both declarations and possible a third for other browsers in the case of opacity.
Starting with IE8 Partner Build, the first declaration above will be applied in standards mode if and only if its syntax is valid. If it is not e.g. the final parenthesis is missing then the declaration will not be applied and our CSS parser fails per the standard.
CSS style sheet encoding detection complies with CSS 2.1 e.g. including @charset directive, charset attribute on link element etc.
For more information on CSS please see CSS 2.1 Compliance.

Compatibility View List:
Check box added in Tools->Compatibility View Settings to receive updates from Microsoft. At the moment, the functionality of this feature works but our list will not be activated until the next release of IE.

Filter Syntax Property:
IE8 will accept the current filter syntax as well as the fully quoted syntax (“–ms” prefix) previously announced for IE8 in the Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions blog post.

Links Bar:
A new option allows users to put as many items on the Favorites bar as they want. The size of Links bar items can now be set to long (default), short (5 characters), or simply the favicon.

InPrivate Blocking:
New InPrivate Blocking button on the status bar. This can be pressed to turn InPrivate Blocking on and off.
InPrivate Blocking now has a quick on/off entry in the Safety menu (or Ctrl-Shift-B)
The InPrivate Blocking on/off setting is now a session-specific option. InPrivate Blocking will be off by default each time users launch Internet Explorer.
InPrivate Blocking can now be turned on for all browsing sessions, not just InPrivate Browsing sessions.
UI Improvements to the InPrivate Blocking settings dialog
New feature first-run dialog box
For more information on InPrivate Blocking, please see InPrivate in the IE8 Readiness Toolkit. [...]

Known Issues:
Compatibility with Facebook
The Facebook friends list program has a known issue with the IE8 Partner Build. When you use the “Add to list” box from the friends list it causes the browser to hang. At this time, there is no known workaround.