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.

Both Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have continued their upward trends through April, increasing their market share. Firefox increased it’s share to 22.5%, up half a percent on last month, while Google Chrome was up around a quarter of a percent to 1.4% share.

Internet Explorer on the other hand continued to bleed users, slumping for another month. Despite the release of Internet Explorer 8, the browser lost almost three quarters of a percent to finish of the month with 66.1% market share.

Both Apple’s Safari and Opera stayed steady for the month, with 8.2% and 0.7% market shares respectively.

More detailed results can be seen using Market Share by Net Applications.

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.

Microsoft has confirmed that it has received a one-week extension from EU antitrust regulators to respond to charges stemming to anti-competitive behaviour.

The complaint is for Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, hence discouraging competition in the browser market.

At this point it should be noted that with early builds of Windows 7, Internet Explorer can be removed from the system.

If Microsoft loose, the company may be forced to offer multiple browsers with new copies of Windows.

Microsoft have till April 28 to respond to the Commission’s statement of objections.

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.

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