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We have installed our first stable version of Magento 1.8 this morning, here are the release notes from the Magento site.

We will be running more performance tests in the next few weeks.

Magento 1.8 is already available to our customers via our auto installer.

This new edition improves tax calculations, boosts product quality and stability, enhances performance, and advances security for the rapidly growing Magento community.
[break][/break] Key highlights include:
Enhanced Tax Calculations
Magento Community Edition 1.8 improves tax calculation accuracy for VAT merchants and eliminates potential rounding errors that can be confusing to buyers. Knowledge Base updates also provide more guidance on tax configurations and Canadian tax requirements, enabling you to more fully benefit from the native Magento tax engine.
[break][/break] Functional Improvements
We made approximately 350 functional improvements that boost product quality in key areas, including the web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components, and payment methods.
[break][/break] Performance Improvements
Magento Community Edition 1.8 enables a better shopping experience through faster page-loading in the checkout process and optimized cache adapters for single server systems, which minimize the number of cached pages that must be refreshed when product updates are made. The performance of the 1.8 administrator panel is also improved for those of you with large product or order databases.
[break][/break] Security Enhancements
Through a number of enhancements, we also strengthened the security of Magento Community Edition. A full list of enhancements is available in the magento release notes.
[break][/break] Updates to the Alpha Release
A few new updates were made to the alpha version of Magento Community Edition 1.8. We removed the requirement to have globally unique category and product URL keys, giving you greater flexibility in your URL structures. We also incorporated the recent USPS API patch, DHL code updates, and the latest Redis backend cache code, now called Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis. We have also included Cm_RedisSession, a Redis session storage module.