Watch original video:

With competition in the Web browser market continuing to mount, Microsoft is responding by in greater numbers frequent releases of Internet Explorer. The company announced the first release candidate — a near-final version — of Internet Explorer 8 is useful today.

The release candidate, which has improvements to of the sight search, private browsing and a smart address bar, can be downloaded from this page. [Update, 12:13 p.m.: This conjoin only offers a download of Beta 2 of IE8. I’mingle-mangle checking on where you have power to get the release solicitant bits and will post a fasten in the present state as at so early an hour in the same proportion that I find out.]

[Update, 12:34 p.m.: Behind this link, you’ll observe the various flavors of the Internet Explorer 8 set free candidate for various Windows operating systems — Vista, XP, Server 2003, etc.] A more detailed list of features can exist originate in this story on the second test release of IE8 in September.

“We had a feature complete browser at beta and truly focused on the time between beta and now to take feedback from customers to make sure we could understand issues they may be having, but also tweak new features we’d added,” before-mentioned Mike Nash, corporate vice president for Windows Product Management.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001 and let five years pass control releasing a final version of IE7 in October 2006.

That earlier lag time between releases allowed competitors to gain ground. As recently as 2004, Internet Explorer had more than 90 percent of the browser market. In summer 2008, IE’s mart share was 73 percent, Firefox had 19 percent and Apple’s Safari had 6 percent, according to Net Applications.


Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2009/01/26/microsoft_announces_release_candidate_of_internet.html