I'm still very wary of this new browser. Microsoft keeps saying since IE9 that they finally delivered, but it's not the case yet. IE still lags behind and still has quirks.

I actually downloaded the IE11 VM from http://modern.ie the other day to give it another chance. A not very pleasant experience. After boot, I was greeted with a desktop background with some instructions, presented as a badly compressed JPEG. I'll be honest, and vote me down if you must, but I'd be ashamed to have delivered this kind of work. Make it a PNG or a BMP even, it's not going to inflate the 4GB download size noticeably.

As for IE itself, I cannot really judge its rendering because VirtualBox doesn't seem to run Windows 10 accelerated, and I think the font rendering in particular suffers from this. I can't say though.

It still has some quirks that need to be worked around. I noticed this particular JavaScript problem.

  var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
  xhr.timeout = 1000;
  xhr.ontimeout = function() {console.log('Error')};
  xhr.open('GET', '/');
  xhr.send();

This throws an exception in IE11. IE only allows timeout to be set between open() and send(). It's allowed to be set at any point per specs, even after send().

https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-timeout-attribute

Microsoft has documentation, from the time of IE8, which clarifies this. Apparently nobody at Microsoft cared to fix this since.

> The timeout property may be set only in the time interval between a call to the open method and the first call to the send method.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/cc304105.aspx

So I tried to report this as a bug. IE doesn't have a public bug tracker, only what appears to be a way to send "suggestions" to the IE team. I read a few of them. There is little activity. You basically only get a formal PR-like response.

Microsoft still has much work to do.