So, Internet Explorer 8 was just officially released. First off, I was really impressed with the download speeds. In the past downloading Day 0 releases from Microsoft have always been a bit problematic for me—because of the sheer volume of download requests. However, my download experience was very fast. Kudos Microsoft.
However, one of my main gripes from RC1 is still present—Compatibility view doesn't work consistently. If you're not aware, the following meta tag is supposed to force IE8 to run in Compatibility view:
However, I'm still noticing issues that are inconsistent between adding this to the HTML and a user manually activating Compatibility View for a site.
The quickest way for me to illustrate this is to show you some screenshots.
It appears Microsoft is releasing Internet Explorer 8 today at 12pm EDT/9am PDT. I guess I'll have some testing to do today, as I was still experiencing weird issues with the last IE8 candidate I had installed for beta testing.
I'm not sure where they will be posting the full edition at. Currently you can download the last beta (RC1) from their Internet Explorer beta page. I would imagine the full release will show up at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/, but that's pure speculation on my part.
UPDATE:Looks like the official site for downloading IE8 is http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Read more at Microsoft Announces Availability of Internet Explorer 8.