While basic sites work, some things just aren't possible to do in IE yet. For example, http://www.wavesurfer.fm/ works in every recent browser other than IE 11.

That's not entirely fair.

In terms of ticking boxes for new features, yes, IE certainly trails Firefox and Chrome by a few months, sometimes even a year or two.

On the other hand, when IE does claim to implement something, generally that implementation is fast, robust and stable. That certainly can't be said for Chrome or Firefox. Some obvious examples are the awful font rendering in Chrome (only just being fixed at the moment), lack of H.264 support for <video> elements in Firefox (still not fixed, just avoided on Windows with a workaround), and performance problems rendering SVGs that really undermine things like animations and using lots of SVG icons on a page in both browsers, just to pick three widely used recent features that all major browsers now claim to support.

While basic sites work, some things just aren't possible to do in IE yet.

That's very loaded terminology. Almost all real sites work just fine in any recent version of IE. The few that don't are mostly things like web design blogs and demos that push the bleeding edge because they want to.

Often these sites use features that aren't standardised yet and maybe still need browser prefixes to access the feature at all. These are exactly the kind of features that Chrome and Firefox tend to half-implement and then regress or change the spec several times over the next year or two before finally dropping the prefix. I doubt any professional web developer would actually use that kind of feature on a production site today unless they had very unusual requirements to meet. The example site you gave is another example of this.

Input (was 5/20, now 7/20) * Gamepad control

Storage (was 26/30, now 30/30) * Database storage - Objectstore Blob support - Objectstore ArrayBuffer support

So, previous IE 11 score: 372/555, IE 11 Dev Channel score: 378/555.

IE9 to IE10 was aggressively launched as well. I believe users got a basic prompt and IE turned on auto-updating by default. According to some of my users, IE10 just appeared, so my guess is that MS may have the prompt time-out to 'yes' instead of infinitely holding the computer.

Here in corporitstan, I had to put in extra blocks to keep 10 and 11 away, due to our CRM being suck on IE9 for the time being. Trust me, MS is trying real hard to get everyone to the newest version of IE.

So that experience alone tells me that not everything is done right yet. And even if everything would work, they have to keep doing things right for some time to regain trust.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/internet-explorer/ie-11-w...

Windows 8.1 is a free upgrade on Windows 8.0, more like a service pack release (when you look at the changes). Why not port it to Windows 8.0, it didn't make sense, 8.0 should fade out as people install the free upgrade that comes via Windows Updates (or the store, I forget which) and is a mandatory update. Opting out of mandatory updates means you opt out of associated upgrades.

This isn't a new or unique policy in Windows, look at iOS, you won't get WebGL on Mobile Safari without iOS 8, OSX doesn't back-port Safari and Andriod has a lot of versions with terrible browsers.

Win8 ships with IE10. If it did an upgrade, then you should be on 11 now.

Also, most of the WebGL demos around the net do not work in Firefox for me - it is possible that it is something to do with the installed drivers. However, they work perfectly work for me in IE.

They have auto update for more than a couple of years now.

http://www.geek.com/news/microsoft-decides-to-automatically-...

IE11 has been released on October 2013 (8 months ago), but IE10 market share is still 6.77% today (compare with IE11 at 17.03%). I'm quoting NetMarketShare (but it doesn't really matter, all browser stats agree on this topic, with slightly different numbers).

For comparison, Chrome and Firefox versions usually go under 1% after no more than 4 months after a newer version has been released.

You're now part of a statistic that will be (sometimes wilfully) misinterpreted to force devs to support IE6-10 and to not support all the exciting technologies that IE doesn't support.

Please reconsider what you're doing, it's bad for the web ecosystem and therefore society in general.