Just had my computer upgraded to IE11 with corporate autoloader - took just over an hour with at least 3 restarts. Forum screens are looking much better now!
1st test - does Modify work?
Yes it does! Woo hoo!
CrossRoads:
Just had my computer upgraded to IE11 with corporate autoloader - took just over an hour with at least 3 restarts.
First sign that MS still has a lot to learn about the modern market. These days, you shouldn't need to restart except maybe once in a blue moon to really get out of a FUBAR. Install should be a brief progress bar on next re-launch, after it downloaded the necessary fixes while you were reading your favorite news site. Version numbers are pretty much irrelevant. Platform is pretty much irrelevant. Content is the only thing that matters, and getting to it with the least fuss possible. If you aren't aware of your OS, it's doing its job properly.
The recent IE developer's IAMA was interesting, and the devs were both humble and positive. But I feel bad for those guys. Too little too late. For most people, IE is merely a browser pre-installation environment. The competition is too good, the results too similar (unless they're not, which is worse), that it comes down to things like aesthetics, and that constant %$@^$%# navigation clicking sound that seems to come back from the dead after I disable it. ><
That was as far as I got in the forum - after that, no matter what I did I kept getting dumped to the "You already logged in screen", and all I could do was look at my profile. I could read if not logged in, nothing else. So something is still hosed.
IE in gov't/DOD/corporate world - it's not going away, a lot of effort goes into keeping things secure, and chrome/etc apparently doesn't cut it.
Hi, I had to think IE11???? So long since I used it.
Chrome here, The PC magazines used to always include copy of IE, but now they don't, they have no confidence in the product at all.
Tom...... 
I can only speak to the corporate side - they check things out, ensure compliance with all the already installed programs, do a lot of testing, and then roll it out to everyone - tens of thousands of computers, with lots of e-mail and internet access screening & blocked websites to keep it virus free.
At the home level, you're on your own ....
Corporate is another matter entirely, for sure, but it's a double-edged sword. MS made their bed, and now they're being forced to lie in it. All the crap they pulled trying to "differentiate their product" is coming back to bite them, as anything beyond IE7 doesn't work quite like IE7 (thankfully), and there's a lot of software out there using ActiveX, and Quirks mode, and user agent and CSS conditionals.
So, you have (expensive, proprietary, and critical) legacy applications that don't even work in browser "compatibility" mode, so IT is forced to block IE upgrades. Meanwhile, the web has moved on, so it's becoming commonplace to have old IE for That One Big App, and Chrome / FF for everything else.
All while MS is trying to reinvent themselves and shed the baggage of their legacy. Well, that's what you get for trying to dominate the market with vendor lock-in, and being about three years late with a follow-up to IE6. Next time, don't do that.
I have no sympathy. I've built websites when IE6 could not be ignored. I've set policies in IT when users had competing demands for compatibility with intranet applications and Web 2.0 applications. IE made life difficult for everybody, for years, so it can fade painfully into obsolescence for all I care. No amount of rebranding is going to change that.
As for securing third-party browsers, there's a lot they could do to enhance the Group Policy infrastructure and make third-party applications more manageable, but again, they were so busy trying to make IE (or whatever their offering) the de-facto choice, that they essentially missed that boat too. Now, Active Directory and Exchange are about the only things keeping Windows relevant ... and Google has their cross-hairs squarely on Exchange.
Finally put Win 8.1 on my desktop. Had been putting it off because the install had failed on my laptop many months back. They sort of forced the issue. OK, I get it. Well mostly.
Anyway it was painful. Lost count of the reboots over at least an hour and a half. Non-functional device drivers once it completed. Tried to deinstall one, then it wanted to reboot again, but it never came back up completely. Once I finally got that all sorted, Firefox, Chrome and IE all had problems rendering certain pages correctly. Turned out to be an incompatibility with Avast "Web Shield". I've only found one site that's affected so far, disabling Web Shield is a reasonable workaround in that case. Not sure whose problem that is.
So it was pretty much a Charlie Foxtrot. Took all day to get productive again. I hate Microsoft more and more every day.
</R&R>