If you bought Windows and it didn’t come with a web browser you be upset. People would say things like, “Macs and Linux come with a browser, why can’t Windows?”

Just think if Windows was just an OS without any included applications. No calculator, no calendar, web browser, email application, text editor, file manager, etc. What would you think of Microsoft?

If Opera wants to be distributed with Windows then it can pay for it. But then people are going to complain about the extra icons that are placed on the desktop and the extra disk space it takes up.

No matter how it works out, someone is going to be angry with the outcome.

Microsoft should give you the chance to uninstall IE if you don’t like it after having downloaded an alternative browser.

Internet Explorer can be uninstalled if you so choose.

Yes, it is dominant, but I wouldn’t say it is easy to make a site that works perfectly in it. If it was easy I think there would be no complaints, but that’s not the case at all.

A lot of the issues fall back on JavaScript these days, where browsers handle JavaScript differently. That causes the AJAX-heavy sites to often fail in Opera, or at the very least they’ll warn users that they are using an unsupported browser every time the site is visited.

Because developers don’t take the time to test sites in Opera. When we designed our new theme we made a point to test it in all of the major browsers, include Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, and a few others. That way we knew that visitors using almost any browser would be able to view our site without any troubles. The problem with that is it took days for us to complete the testing in all the various browsers, and the more extensive a site is the longer it is going to take.

That’s definitely an idea, but how many people do you know are actually knowledgeable enough to connect to an FTP? I know I would be receiving dozens of support calls every week from people wondering why they can’t get on the Internet.

Connect to the ftp site of firefox or opera and and download it from there. Even this is more acceptable than using a crap piece of software like IE.

I hate having to fire up Firefox or IE to properly display websites that the designers were too lazy to make compliant with the standards. Since IE is dominant, and because it is easy to hack a website together that works with that piece of crap, some websites don’t work with Opera. Those websites never get bookmarked, either.

Don’t blame Microsoft for lazy or incompetent developers.