As expected, on Monday, January 26th, Microsoft made the first release candidate version (RC1) for Internet Explorer 8 available to the public. You have to know where to go to find it, however, due to some site updating issues.

At the time of this writing, while their site image (above) says you can download RC1, when you click through you only see Beta 2. However, if you go to this URL you can download IE8 RC1 in just about every OS flavor imaginable — except Windows 7, that is. Windows 7 has its own version of IE8 built-in already.

Just remember, this is still not final code. A release candidate is much further along than a beta, but can still be buggy. This is, however, expected to be the last public release prior to the actual final software.

One important change that should really improve ease-of-use: Microsoft has made IE8 more standards-compliant than prior Internet Explorer versions. While in-and-of-itself that’s good, it also means that certain sites that have been coded to meet the quirks of say, IE7, have problems with IE8. Thus IE8 has a Compatibility View button.

In the Release Candidate, Microsoft has (smartly) added a pre-supplied list of sites that are problematic to the software. Thus, when you go to those sites, the browser renders the site in Compatibility Mode automatically. Naturally, you can manually add sites, but additionally, Microsoft will update its site list as time passes.

You can bet that this new release of IE8 will foster benchmarking between it, the latest release of Chrome, the latest release of Firefox 3.1. Previous benchmarking has shown Chrome and Firefox 3.1 to be running nearly neck-and-neck in front of IE8. Now? Start your stopwatches.