Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1. I was testing the new IE8 version today in my day to day work on a Windows XP PC. Besides the typical hanging and crashing (I think to remember IE7 did the same thing) after the initial installation and reboot the new Microsoft browser is quite fast and snappy.
The difference is big enough that I cannot imagine having to go back to IE7. I just hope IE8 RC1 is not developing some instability. If you have actually had installed previous IE8 builds on XP, you might be stuck with IE8 anyway.
The rendering of web pages is really much faster and the load times of the browser itself and new tabs also improved. All sites I have visited rendered correctly and I only see differences in the way the pages get loaded and rendered.

The look of the "Chrome" is slightly cleaner. There are lots of new features in the IE8 RC1 that I do not need in my use of the web. IE8 is also not standing in my way of doing the things how I was doing them with IE7 - it’s just much faster now.

Of course Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari are also very fast in terms of rendering. I am just too used (as millions others) to using IE for most of my online activity.
You can download IE8 RC1 on the Microsoft site. Details about the new IE8 features can be found in our initial report.