Microsoft quietly released the first update to its IE8 beta 2 to its closest partners last week. This new version is marked as “Release Candidate 1” and is expected to be the final IE8 pre-release update Microsoft intends to make available to the public sometime in the first quarter of 2009. TG Daily was able to take the browser for a first spin: We noticed that Microsoft made significant progress in some areas, but is standing still others. RC1, which is believed to be the first feature-complete version of the browser, will not match the JavaScript performance of all other major browsers.