On Monday, January 26 at 12pm PT, Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) will be released to tech and consumer enthusiasts in a total of 25 languages.

Users should visit www.microsoft.com/ie8

IT Professionals should visit http://technet.microsoft.com/ie

Developers should visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie

Since Beta 2, you’ll note some of the changes in RC1 include the following:

ClickJacking protection. The SmartScreen Filter now includes the ability to help detect and prevent “ClickJacking” which is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer.

InPrivate™. Helps to protect user’s data and privacy from being retained “locally” on a PC. InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering can now be used independently.

Performance improvements. Reduces the time that users must wait when starting the browser, opening a “new tab”, or loading a page.

User interface and experience updates. There have been several user interface changes to help ensure a better user experience.

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 will be available in 25 languages including: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified and Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Swedish

For some additional information on running IE8 RC1 on Windows 7 beta, please check out the following link: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/10/ie8-in-windows-7-beta.aspx

I still think that InPrivate should have been named PornMode :-)