Support for Internet Explorer 8 is bound to the lifecycle of the Windows version it is installed on as it is considered an OS component, thus it is unsupported on Windows XP due to the end of extended support on April 8, 2014. Internet Explorer 8 is the last version of Internet Explorer to be supported on Windows XP versions SP2–SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista versions RTM–SP1 and Windows Server 2008 RTM as the following version, Internet Explorer 9, will only work on Windows Vista SP2 or later and Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later. According to Microsoft, security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS CSS, and Ajax support were its priorities for IE8.
Internet Explorer 8 is the first version of IE to pass the Acid2 test, and the last of the major browsers to do so (In the later Acid3 Test, it only scores 24/100.). It was also made available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008. It was released on March 19, 2009, and is the default browser for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. Windows Internet Explorer 8 ( IE8) is a graphical web browser by Microsoft, the eighth version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 7.
