IE is hardly evergreen. IE11 is curiously not available on Windows 8.0, although it is available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. They also publish update blockers [1]. Maybe this is why StatCounter still shows a huge IE10 presence [2]. The point of an evergreen browser is to make older browser version shares negligable as quickly as possible, and it doesn't seem that's really happening.
It's free, but, yeah, I had to open the Windows Store or whatever and actually make it update. It did not show up in the Windows Update list (not even in the "Suggested Updates").
What about corporate installations? Is 8.0 -> 8.1 seemless enough or will there be a substantial delay in a standard enterprisey environment and thus creating a new browser isle?
8.0 should (hopefully) be a very short lived release in the wild. There's no reason at all not to upgrade to 8.1, even in a corporate setting, 8.1 is free, and the upgrade process is very smooth.
At one point CheckPoint VPN didn't support 8.1, now it does. One of my customers uses it so I held off upgrading. There could well be other apps with similar issues and big corporates would prefer others discover them.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=4072...
[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially...