14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft may have already started gathering feedback for Internet Explorer 9 and debuted planning for the next iteration of IE, but it is still in the process of making Internet Explorer 8 available worldwide. On May 29, 2009, the Redmond company released a new wave of IE8 RTW downloads, the third one since the initial release of the browser. A total of 20 new flavors of Internet Explorer 8 have been released to web and are now up for grabs for users worldwide.
The 20 new IE8 releases offered represent just as many new localized versions of the browser. IE8 now comes in Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Uzbek (Latin). While IE8 RTW in all the languages enumerated above is indeed available for 32-bit Windows Vista, the same is not valid for users of Windows XP.
As far as x86 XP is concerned, some support is missing for some languages such as Assamese, while for other ones, including Punjabi, the release is “coming soon,” according to Vishwac Sena Kannan, international program manager, Internet Explorer. With the latest wave of downloads, Internet Explorer 8 now comes with support for a total of 63 languages. That's seven short compared to Firefox 3.5, which is now at Beta 4 stage and heading toward the first Release Candidate. With Firefox 3.5, formerly version 3.1, Mozilla offers no less than 70 localized versions of the open-source browser.
Microsoft released IE8 to web in March 2009 at the MIX09 conference. At that time, the software giant was offering just 25 localized versions of the browser. The number grew with the addition of 18 releases on April 28. At the end of April, Microsoft had also started the automatic distribution of Internet Explorer 8. The browser is offered through Windows Update to all users of IE6 and IE7, but also pre-final IE8, on Windows XP and Windows Vista with AU enabled. Users have to give the update the green light, as previous versions of IE will not upgrade to IE8 automatically.
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).