Better late than never, Microsoft finally confirmed the release candidate for IE8 would be available in the first quarter of 2009 indicating the official release will be shipped a couple of months later.

In browser wars, for very long time, Microsoft had just sit back and let Firefox crush the field overconfident in once 95% market share. Today, Firefox is getting more and more ground in both individual user front and enterprise level segment.

With IE8, Microsoft focus closely on compatibility with Web Standards – many parts of which was intentionally ignored in previous versions – aiming at full support of W3C’s CSS 2.1. This means web sites developed to comply with standards will be compatible across multiple browsers.

Moreover, IE8 seems much better in terms of protecting people from security risks. It is said that IE is even more secure than Firefox and Chrome on Windows Vista because the OS itself is assisting in the protection process.

“Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is on by default with IE 8, and when working with Vista SP1, it can prevent damage to your systems from viruses and other malicious code because it prevents the code from writing to executable memory space.” said Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld.

Though Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager overseeing IE8, said in an entry to a company blog that the IE8 release candidate would be the final there is still much complaint about the stability of the Beta 2. So, should there be another beta before the RC?