The final development stage has been reached with Internet Explorer 9 and earlier today Microsoft announced the availability of the IE9 Release Candidate for immediate download.

I now have it running on our systems here and it is quite stable compared to the beta which gave us some troubles.  I must say the RC is much faster than the beta was as well.  I am looking forward to continuing to put it through its paces.

Now just for clarification a Release Candidate, RC for short, is a feature complete piece of software.  At this point no new features are typically added and the code is almost gold for final release.  A RC is tested to see if there are any show-stopper bugs that must be fixed prior to Release to Manufacturing or RTM.

Microsoft did not reveal any information relating to a specific RTM date but I am sure they will base that on any feedback and telemetry they get from the RC’s performance and use.

To wrap up this post I thought I would share a collection of IE9 RC links from around the web.  As you might imagine it is getting talked about quite a bit today.

IE9 RC Links