In February 2008, Microsoft sent out private invitations for IE8 Beta 1, and on March 5, 2008, released Beta 1 to the general public, although with a focus on web developers. IE8 development started in or before March 2006. On April 9, 2019, Microsoft released the final IE8 update for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009, the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP, marking the end of IE8 support on all platforms. On January 12, 2016, Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported on numerous version of Windows, due to new policies specifying that only the newest version of IE would be available for a supported version of Windows will be supported. 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 support Windows XP Service Packs 2 and 3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista versions below SP2 and Windows Server 2008 below SP2 as the following version, Internet Explorer 9, will only support 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. Additionally, it introduced a compatibility mode to optionally emulate older versions' rendering behaviour, and colour-coded tab groups where links opened in new tabs share the colour of which they originated from. 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 was the default browser for Windows 7 (later default was Internet Explorer 11) 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.

Enabling cookies internet explorer 8