Internet Explorer has certainly come a long way since version 6. While I'm not running it as my primary browser, IE8 is a big improvement and sport a number of very useful features.

One that was touted yesterday on the IEBlog was the ability to access more than one webmail account (or any other account that utilizes sessions). Head to the file menu and click New Session and IE8 will spawn a new window that doesn't share session information with the original window.

To launch a new window from a shortcut, just add the -nomerge parameter to the end of the target on its properties page. Double click it, and the new window will open free of any baggage from previously launched instances of IE.

• Accelerators that make web-based services available through a right-click context menu. For instance, you can click on a word or phrase and map it or email it.
• Web slices provide information from web sites like Wikipedia or Digg available in little pop up windows that you can check out without navigating away from the page you're on.
• Improved search box features including visual previews and "quick pick" search engine selection.

While it's not likely to win back power users that have moved on to browsers like Chrome or Firefox, IE8 RC1 is a definite improvement. To the average user, features like accelerators, slices, and visual search, along with the built-in privacy and safety features, will likely make RC1 an appealing option.

To see how RC1 compares to the competition, I ran it through Sunspider and Acid3. There's been plenty of debate before about how useful these tests are. At the very least, they provide a little insight about what's going on under the hood.

Acid3
As expected, the Acid test was abyssmal. RC1 failed to render the page correctly and only managed a 20 (compared to a 71 in Firefox 3.0.5 and a 77 in Chrome).

Windows XP 32-bit
Server 2003 32-bit
Windows XP and Server 2003 64-bit
Vista and Server 2008 32-bit
Vista and Server 2003 64-bit