Internet Explorer 8 has almost arrived, and just in time for the Microsoft Corporation which faces serious competition from the likes of Mozilla Firefox and the Opera browser. The software giant recently presented the first Internet Explorer 8 release candidate for public download, two years after Internet Explorer 7 hit the web and just in time for the upcoming Windows 7 operating system.

Since Internet Explorer 8 is still a release candidate, and not a final product, it hasn't yet been included on Windows Update. If you wish to try it out now, you must head over to Microsoft's Internet Explorer download page to grab the release candidate and install the 16.6MB executable. PCSTATS loaded up the IE8 browser on a fairly mainstream computer running Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2.

Browsers aren't particularly hardware intensive, but in case you're wondering the test system had a Celeron 2.4GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. The minimum requirements for Internet Explorer 8 are a 233MHz Pentium processor, at least 64MB of RAM and Windows XP (Service Pack 2) or higher. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer 8 are available.

Installation went without a hitch, taking a few minutes to unpack and integrate the new browser into Windows XP. During the installation process Internet Explorer 8 will completely replace any previous versions of Internet Explorer installed on the computer, so it's not possible to run two different versions of the software at the same time.

You can read the entire article at PCStats.