Three months after the RTW of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft continues to make available releases of the browser. At the end of the past week, the company started serving five additional localized versions of IE8 with support for the following languages: Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi (India), Kannada, and Bengali (India). Vishwac Sena Kannan, international program manager, Internet Explorer, explained that the five new languages for Internet Explorer 8 RTW had been announced since the start of June 2009.

At that time, Microsoft offered no less than 20 localized flavors of Internet Explorer 8, on top of the 43 already available. However, while IE8 in Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Kannada, and Bengali was offered for Windows Vista, the variants for Windows XP had not been delivered and were “coming soon.” A month later, the five IE8 releases can now be grabbed by users looking to take advantage of the latest IE browser release from Microsoft tailored to their specific language. But even with the extra downloads the number of supported languages for IE8 remains 63.

By comparison, Mozilla, with the Release Candidate 3 build of Firefox 3.5, delivers support for a total of 70 languages. Firefox 3.5 RC3 was released the past week, with the final release of versions 3.0's successor just around the corner. Microsoft itself has started planning the next iteration of Internet Explorer.

IE8 was launched in mid-March 2009 for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003. Version 8 of IE is also the default browser for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, with the exception of the E SKU of the platform for Europe, which will ship stripped of IE8. The Redmond company has so far been mute on the future of Internet Explorer, limiting details available for the public to confirming that it was gathering feedback for IE Next, also referred to as IE9.

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).