What is "release candidate one" ?

[Bob Weisner]

Hi:

What is Internet Explorer release candidate one? Is that a test version ?

[Damien Falgoust]

It means it's not a beta release but not quite a final release.

Basically, it means that the major bugs (one hopes) have been squashed, the product is close to final release, and they're just doing some final spit and polish before the "official" final release.

The Firefox browser developers do this before their major revisions: you'll see Release Candidate 1 (RC1), RC2, RC3, etc available until the developers are finally satisfied that everything is "just right."