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.

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.

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.

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.

With 2009 fast approaching, details for IE Mobile 6 have started to appear. The latest mobile Internet browser from Microsoft should bring a positive change to the web browser market.

Currently, there are still no screenshots available, as Microsoft has made all beta testers and OEM’s sign NDA’s, but details on the new browser are starting to emerge. Here are some of the key features for IE Mobile 6.

• A full HTML rendering engine (unfortunately based on IE6).
• Support for Adobe Flash Lite 3.1, something still not found on Apple’s iPhone.
• AJAX and JScript 5.7 support.
• Support for touch, including scrolling and zooming.
• Ability to switch between full and mobile versions of websites.

With these unique, and some innovative features, IE Mobile 6 may make up some ground in the mobile browser market, but is it enough to entice Opera Mobile or even iPhone Safari users?