14 DAY TRIAL // The March 19 release to web of Internet Explorer 8 RTW is just the first step in a complex availability ballet for the browser that will stretch well into mid-2009. Still, there is more to come for the successors of Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft continues to cook future releases of IE8, as well as automatic upgrades. Still, for the time being, IE is available for manual download and integration with 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, including SP2 and SP3, Windows Vista RTM/SP1, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The Wave 0 release involves the following localized versions: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified and Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
Just as it has been mute on the development milestones of IE8 up until the releases were served to testers, Microsoft is keeping mum on the next stages in the availability of the browser. Having announced the launch of IE8, Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager, said nothing concrete related to where Microsoft would take the browser next: “Now, the release of IE8 today isn't really an end, but the beginning of a great developer opportunity. And what matters most for tomorrow is what you, the developer, start doing today. It's very easy to underestimate this opportunity,” he warned.
But of course that there will be quite some time before Microsoft will have wrapped up offering Internet Explorer 8 to all users. In just a month, the week of April 20, 2009, the company plans to offer IE8 Wave 1, with the following localized versions: Bosnia (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, according to a leaked product map by TechARP.
And in fact, Wave 2 of Internet Explorer 8 is scheduled for release in the first week of June 2009 with language versions for: Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi (India), Tamil, Telugu, Uzbek (Latin).
Internet Explorer 8 Wave 0, Wave 1 and Wave 2 will all hit first the Microsoft Download Center. Users will be able to grab the bits and manually install them on top of the supported operating systems. At the same time, Microsoft will also make IE8 RTW available through Windows Update. The company is reportedly planning to offer IE8 RTW via WU to IE8 Beta and RC users in the next week, with IE6 and IE7 users starting to have access to IE8 RTW Wave 0 bits trough WU in the week of April 13. Internet Explorer 8 Wave 1 will hit WU in the week of May 18, 2009, while the deadline for Wave 2 has yet to be announced.
Microsoft will also offer automatic upgrades to Internet Explorer 8 to all current IE6 and IE7 users, provided that the supported versions of Windows have Automatic Updates enables. IE8 RTW Wave 0 will be served through AU on April 27, 2009, Wave 1 will follow May 5, 2009 with Wave 2 planned for June 24, 2009.
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).