Put together by the Bing team

May 6, 2010 13:30 GMT  ·  By

Optimized flavors of Internet Explorer 8 are available for download from Microsoft itself, as well as a variety of third-party sources that have taken it upon themselves to customize the browser. The latest release offered by the Redmond company involves a copy of Internet Explorer 9’s predecessor tailored to Bing. Essentially, the optimization is synonymous with the addition of a few extensions, settings, and favorites that can also be performed manually by users starting with a plain vanilla version of Internet Explorer.

According to Microsoft’s Marc Holmes, the Bing-centric version of Internet Explorer 8 has been put together by the Bing team. Obviously, the IE8 copy personalized and packaged by Microsoft’s Bing team has the software giant’s decision/search engine at its core. However, the Redmond company has tweaked additional aspects of the browser, including Webslices and Accelerators.

“The Bing team have released a flavour of IE8 that takes full advantage of the simple but effective extensibility of the browser, which is quite a nice idea including:

“- Bing Toolbar – Instant access to News, Email Video and more. - Bing Weather webslice – Get the latest weather and forecast for your location. - Bing Images search and accelerator - A visual preview of the images [a]round the web as indexed by Bing. - Bing Video search and accelerator - A visual preview of the videos [a]round the web as indexed by Bing. - Ciao offers webslice - Top lists direct from the Ciao! editorial team, pulling together the hottest products available. - Ciao visual search - A direct site search of Ciao list products, with price comparisons [and] consumer reviews. - A selection of Bing bookmarked favourites and the Bing search homepage.”

As I’ve said, additional optimized copies of IE8 are available for download, including for MSN and Xbox. There’s even a flavor of Internet Explorer 8 optimized for Softpedia, all to show the power of the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 (IEAK 8).

Internet Explorer 8 Softpedia Edition is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download
here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 (IEAK 8) is available for download here.