Microsoft have announced on the IE8 Blog that the first release candidate for IE 8 can now be downloaded and users already running a beta version of IE 8 will be offered an update through Windows Update.

The new version of IE offers vastly improved conformance with web based standards hopefully meaning an end to all those IE CSS hacks that web developers have had to use for some time now to get web pages to display correctly in all browsers. I for one look forward to the day when as long as I code a page based on HTML and CSS standards that it will work across all the major browsers. I have not tried IE 8 myself yet and am unsure how close Microsoft will get to making my dream a reality but Microsoft have certainly made a huge leap forward in this arena and in time it will help make the internet a more consistent place and hopefully make quite a few web developers jobs a lot easier.