IE8 Provides Support for 63 Languages, Finally

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 30 Jun 2009

A little over three months after the final version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has been released onto the web and the development team behind the browser can finally boast that IE8 provides support for a total of 63 languages from all over the world. Initially the browser provided support for 25 languages; then 18 more languages and later on 20 more languages were added to the pot, but the catch is that out of these last 20 languages, a total of 5 were still not available for Windows XP x86, just for Vista x86. This is no longer the case!

International Program Manager, Vishwac Sena Kannan, comments: “We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP for 5 additional languages today. These languages were tagged as “Coming Soon” in our [ June announcement ]. Please visit our World wide sites page to download Internet Explorer in your preferred locale/ language.”

The languages in question are: Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi (India), Bengali (India), and Kannada.

To put things in perspective, here is how language support for IE8 was rolled out:

- Initial IE8 language support: 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.

- Then in April support for 18 additional languages was added: Bulgarian, Bosnian (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovakian, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. The language packs are available for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

- In June support for an additional 20 languages was added: Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Uzbek (Latin).

Out of this final language support addition, 5 were not available for Windows XP x86 – now they are and IE8 can finaly say it provides support for 63 languages.

A table with the full language availability of IE8, according to the operating system it will be used upon, is available here.
If you would like to get Internet Explorer 8 in your local language, a download location is available on the Worldwide Sites page here.


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