First of all: IE's behavior is stupid, but was correct according to the HTML5 specification (no more?). If you want to blame someone, you have to blame Apple / Quicktime because they asked to remove the poster attribute if the video metadata is uploaded (you can see this behavior in Safari4 with the old Quciktime plugin). Now Chrome and Safari fixed their behavior, and then changed the specification (Nice move).
Yes, you can change this behavior with a workaround, just use preload = "none" in your video element:
<video preload="none" poster="path/to/poster.jpg" src="path/to/video.mp4"></video>
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