Internet Explorer 8 may have just been released in 25 languages in Microsoft’s Download Center, but other languages and availability through Windows Update and Automatic Updates will be coming soon.

The release will be in 3 waves as follows:

Wave 0 – Languages
Arabic, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional),Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew,Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

Wave 1 – Languages
Bosnia (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Wave 2 – Languages
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)

And the release dates for each wave are:

Microsoft Download Center
Wave 0 – March 19, 2009
Wave 1 – Week of April 20, 2009
Wave 2 – Week of June 1, 2009

Windows Update
Wave 0 – Week of March 23 (for Beta / RC users) and Week of April 13 (for all other users)
Wave 1 – Week of May 18, 2009
Wave 2 – TBD

Automatic Updates
Wave 0 – April 27, 2009
Wave 1 – May 5, 2009
Wave 2 – June 24, 2009

Thanks to Tech ARP for the information.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) final to the web today, and it is currently available in 25 languages.

IE8 is a giant leap over IE7 and includes a new powerful rendering engine. Other features include the addition of accelerators, which let you easily find information such as maps, and compatibility view which helps display websites designed for older versions of IE.

More information and download links are available from the Internet Explorer Homepage.

A new report coming out of Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is on average faster than both Google Chrome 1.0 and Firefox 3.0.5.

The report titled Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analyzes how various parts of the browser and their network components can impact on performance benchmarking.

Contradictory to all other tests, Microsoft claims that IE8 outperforms both Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Of interesting note, IE8 loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox while Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE8.

The full 14-page report is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

New Windows 7 betas show that Internet Explorer 8 is an optional install, a move which should keep the EU and Opera happy.

To uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows 7 follow these steps:

• Go to Control Panel
• Open Programs
• Click Turn Windows features on or off
• Deselect Internet Explorer 8

Results for Februrary are in and Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera are all winners for the month.

Februrary statistics from Net Applications shows that Internet Explorers share continued its decline, dropping 0.04% to 67.51%.

Firefox was a big winner, with a 0.2% increase to 21.73%, while Google Chrome increased its share by 0.03% to 1.15%.

Opera also had a good month increasing its share by 0.01% to 0.71%.

Apple’s Safari did not far so well, with the first decrease in months to 8.00%. That’s a 0.29% drop from last month.

The next month will be interesting, with the inimant release of Internet Explorer 8 expected this month and Apple’s Safari 4 beta being released just days ago.

Microsoft has released a new update for Windows 7 users for Internet Explorer 8.

The update – dubbed a compatibility and reliability update – addresses a few issues people were having. A list of fixes include:

• When Internet Explorer 8 is installed with Adobe Flash Player 10, Internet Explorer may become unresponsive.
• You experience a Print dialog box that is unusable when you try to print an Adobe PDF document.
• After a crash, Internet Explorer 8 becomes unresponsive and you must restart the computer to resolve
  the problem.
• Internet Explorer 8 may crash when you visit some Web sites.
• Internet Explorer 8 may crash when you resize the browser window.
• Internet Explorer 8 does not seem to remember information that was stored in cookies on the computer.
• Popular third-party extensions cause crashes in Internet Explorer 8.
• Previously blocked third-party extensions are no longer blocked after you upgrade to Internet Explorer 8.

The update will be pushed out to Windows 7 users via Automatic Updates or can be manually downloaded from Windows Update.

Internet Explorer 8 RTM

Microsoft has finished Internet Explorer 8, with the release to manufacturing (RTM) build expected to hit OEM’s, TechNet, MSDN and Connect in the next few days.

The scoop comes from Russian publication Wzor, with the final build being built on February 21st. This means that any remaining bugs and issues have been fixed.

The final build number is 8.0.6001.18691, with release date for the wider community not expected for a few more weeks.

Microsoft is yet to announce an official release date.

Rumors coming out of Tech ARP suggest that Internet Explorer 8 is headed our way in final two weeks of March.

Internet Explorer 8 will be a free download for existing Windows XP and Windows Vista users, while it is expected OEM partners such as Dell will include the browser pre- installed with new systems.

The date is still speculative, but we should have some more information by early March.

As promised Microsoft has made available Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1).

IE8 RC1 can be installed on both Windows XP and Windows Vista, but is not available for the newely released Windows 7 beta.

Microsoft has posted a full list of changes since beta 2.

You can download the new versions from the Internet Explorer 8 download site.

Microsoft has announced that it will deliver the first release candidate (RC1) of Internet Explorer 8 to the public on Monday.

IE8 has been at beta 2 since August 2008, and this new early release is highly anticipated by many in the industry.

According to Microsoft, “a release candidate means the software is feature complete and the code is basically stable, and a final release is imminent”.

IE8 is more compliant with web standards such as CSS, to web developers delight.

IE8 RC1 will be released for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. We will post links to the download when they are available.