he Internet Explorer 8 RC 1 is out (make sure you disable any add-on toolbars before you run it or it can crash), and clearly there have been some big advances since IE 7. Sadly there have also been some major oversights, but more on those later.

The advances have mostly been in the CSS support, which has actually moved IE forward towards the other browsers. It has made a substantial advance through CSS 2.1, though is still behind the others in terms of CSS 3.

Unfortunately, there are almost no advances at all in DOM support, and IE remains nearly a decade behind the other browsers. Important DOM modules like DOM 2 Style, DOM 2 Events, and DOM 3 XPath have been ignored. The DOM support is basically just as bad as it was in IE 7. The updates are not really worthy of mention next to the missing parts that - -- -- - developers are still in desperate need of.