NeoWin is reporting that IE8 has been RTM within Microsoft. It’ll allegedly be released to the public on Feb on the web after a TechNet/MSDN release. No signs of any dates being mentioned yet. I suspect there’ll be a major ramp up to prepare for the bandwidth hit. I also suspect there will be automatic installation blockers released for those who want to prevent IE8 from being downloaded by automatic updates. This has been done in the past.
I’ve been using IE8 RC1 on Vista SP1 and on Windows 7 Beta 1. I like that each tab is now a separate executable. If a tab crashes then it automatically restarts. It’s noticeable that a lot of sites aren’t IE compatible and you have to enable the “compatibility view” to make them render properly, e.g. GMail.