I know I’m late. That’s because of this.

Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate (RC) has been released few days ago, which means it is nearing the fully functional release. Although it is the most widely used internet browser in the world, because it is default web browser on Windows which is the most used OS in the world as well , it is less popular among geeks and bloggers who prefer Mozilla Firefox and Chrome.

I jumped over from IE6 to IE8, so I’m not too sure what are available on IE7. So does the previous and current company that I’m working with (An American & European company respectively), which still stick on IE6 for reasons largely due to to application incompatibility with IE7. No comments about that.

I just tried IE8 few times today, there are few enhancement and new features that quite interesting.

One of most discussed features is accelerator . To be honest, I find this feature quite useful but that doesn’t mean it is necessary. Basically it provide you with a quick access or shortcut to do something upon finding something that interesting. For instance, you want to share the football result with your friends via email, which you can do it immediately from the result page itself.

Instant search is just like Firefox’s search bar which incorporated few search providers, except that you can switch between search providers and get a new suggested search phrase without leaving the drop down list.

Love to see if the IE add-ons can be expandable and more supportable by third party application developers just like Firefox. IE add-ons are no longer just as if it is active-x kind of stuff that run at the background. Some of add-ons are now accessible via Accelerator, just like Firefox’s browse extension.

There are also Developers Tools for developer purpose.

Performance wise, in some parts, it still lagging behind Firefox and Chrome although there are slight improvement such as the start up time. But this slowness is not obvious to the average user.

Try the new IE8 RC1 here.