Last week Microsoft released its first release candidate (RC1) for Internet Explorer 8. The final stable release is expected later this year.

Ask any web developer about the pain points in their development process, and Internet Explorer is most likely to be high on the list. The greatest challenge has been IE's inconsistent and atypical rendering of css (the code used to control page layout and styling throughout a site). The greatest challenge for developers is maintaining layout consistency between older versions (IE6), the current version (IE7), and other browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome).

IE8 will purportedly have new backward-compatibility tools to ensure less things break. It also is supposed to render pages faster and more efficiently.

The verdict is still out. It seems developers are just now beginning to test sites against this new version. With the new RC release, the software's rendering engine is presumably not going to undergo any significant changes, so I will begin testing sites against this version to ensure layout and style compatibility.