As an appreciation for all their hard work, Microsoft is sending free toolkits to official beta testers of Internet Explorer 8.

“Thank you for your hard work during the Internet Explorer 8 Technical Beta Program. Your dedication to making this product the best it can be is truly amazing. We would like to personally thank you by sending you a small token of our appreciation. We will be sending you an Internet Explorer 8 Workmate Toolkits (see attached images). If you do not want this, then simply respond to this mail with “Thanks, but No Thanks.”” said an email sent out to testers yesterday.

Testers are asked to ensure they have their details up to date on their Connect profile by this Friday US time so they can receive their goodies. An image of the “workmate toolkit” can be seen below.

Microsoft has started a campaign that will donate the financial equivalent of eight meals to the Feeding America network for every complete download of Internet Explorer 8.

The Browse for the Better campaign runs from June 10th till August 8th 2009. Microsoft will be donating $1.15 per download, to a maximum of $1,000,000.

The Feeding America network distributes close to 1000 tones of food per year to more than 25 million low-income individuals in the United States.

More information on how you can help can be found on the Browse for the Better campaign website.

On schedule Microsoft has released the final wave of language packs for Internet Explorer 8, with the browser now available in 63 languages.

New languages included in this wave are 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).

The language packs can be downloaded from the Internet Explorer website.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packs for Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.

The packs are available in a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Hong Kong), French, German, Italian, Japanese and many more.

The packs can be downloaded using the links below:

• Windows XP
• Windows XP Professional x64
• Windows Server 2003 x86
• Windows Server 2003 x64

With Windows 7 Release Candidate just out the door, it seems the operating system is already raising complaints from Mozilla and Opera over the continued bundling of Internet Explorer.

“Our initial review suggests this is a blatant use of the Windows operating system to change the market dynamics of browser usage,” said Mozilla Chairperson, Mitchell Baker.

This is despite the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is now an optional component in Windows 7.

Microsoft still has a month to address the anti-competitive complaints bought against it by the European Union.

A new project has been started by Mozilla with the aim of splitting up Firefox over several processes, with one process for the user interface, and one process for each open tab.

This is similar to both Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8, which both use multiple processes. The advantage of this is that if one tab crashes, it only closes one tab, rather than all open tabs, increasing the general stability of the browser.

The multi-process approach also allows the browser to take use of multiple CPU cores which are increasingly becoming the standard.

At this stage, it doesn’t seem like we will see a full release of this technology in Firefox for at least a year. More information on the project can be found in the Mozilla Links blog.

With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is now seeking suggestions and feedback from users about what they would like to see in Internet Explorer 9.

“Hi Everyone!
We have added a new feedback form on Connect designed specifically to handle improvements for the next version of Internet Explorer. This includes not just feature requests, but all types of feedback including issues that currently exist in IE. Please continue to rate the submissions since we will look at the top rated reports first.

Please be patient with the resolution of the reports you submit as we are in the research phase for the next version of IE. To shed some light on the status of your submissions, we’ll use a new field, Review Status, which will indicate whether we have reviewed the issue or not.

Please see the Connect site for more information.

The IE Team.”

Feedback can currently be left on the Connect website by anyone who was testing IE8.

As per schedule, Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 language packs on the Microsoft Download Centre in 18 additional languages.

The languages include Bosnia (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

The language packs are available for users of Windows Vista and Windows 2008 now in the Microsoft Download Centre.

Here are a few articles that may be of interest – yet don’t all deserve their own post:

Can IE8 Really Tempt You Back To Microsoft? (PC World)
How JavaScript became a browser war battle-ground (ZDNet UK)
Is the geek love affair with Firefox waning? (ZDNet)
Firefox proves a hit with web enthusiasts (VNUNet.com)

Rumors have been circulating that the next version of Internet Explorer could possibly use Apple’s open source WebKit rendering engine.

It appears, as expected, that these rumors were indeed false.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer put to rest any speculation that IE9 would use WebKit. He also told Ars Technica that IE8 would not be the last version of IE.

That solves that mystery.