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So? It didn't prevent other browsers for having a mostly working implementation that they could improve upon with time.

And they supported those mostly working implementations for about 6 weeks. Microsoft supports their releases for years.

Is that even true now that IE11 keeps itself auto-updated to the latest major version?

The support lifecycle still will be the same as far that I can tell.

IE has had auto-update since IE9. IE9 is in the process of being auto-updated to IE10, unless auto-update has been disabled.