14 DAY TRIAL // One recent announcement made by the IE team provides an illustrative example of Internet Explorer 9’s superiority compared to its predecessor, Internet Explorer 8. Vishwac Sena Kannan and Kevin Luu, Program Managers, Internet Explorer revealed that Microsoft is expanding the language support for IE9 as of this week, effectively doubling the number of languages available to customers running the latest iteration of IE.
A part of the announcement is focused on the evolution from IE8 to IE9, with the two IE team members noting that “With IE9, our goal was to deliver more languages faster. More specifically, our goals included the simultaneous release of final IE9 in more languages than IE8, and a shorter interval between the final release of IE9 and the remaining languages.”
IE9 was released in no less than 40 localized version earlier this year, with the availability of the Japanese version postponed due to the natural disaster that hit Japan.
As of May 25th, 2011, there are no less than 93 localized versions of Internet Explorer 9 available for download to customers worldwide, more than any browser, including Firefox 4, Chrome 11, Opera 11 and Safari 5.
It’s also great to have a look at a comparison between IE8 and IE9 in terms of language support.
IE8 Beta 1 shipped in just 3 language versions, with the number growing to 25 for Beta 2. When it released IE9 Beta in September 2010, Microsoft provided support for 33 languages.
With IE9 Release Candidate, the number of localized IE9 versions grew to 40, compared to just 25 for IE8 RC. At the same time, IE9 RTM was offered in 40 languages, IE8 RTM just in 25.
At 14 weeks after general availability, the number of supported languages for IE8 increased to 63, while that for IE9 jumped to 93 in 11 weeks.
Of course, more, better and faster applies not just to IE9 language support in comparison to IE8, but also to other aspects of the browsers, from performance to security, usability, UI design, standards support and compatibility, etc.
It will be interesting to see what the IE team has in stored for Internet Explorer 10.
Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Platform Preview 1 (PP1) is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.