Internet Explorer replacement?

I want to use my car, not change it. I want to use my pc, not disassemble it. Throwing the engine inside out, or disassembling my pc is not my or most people's idea of "usage".

Interesting choice of analogy. With the computerisation of car design and servicing a lot of small garages over here in the UK have disappeared because they just can't afford all the extra equipment needed to service cars from such a large range of manufacturers. More people now are forced to take their cars to single-manufacturer repair shops. Consumers are thus left with less choice as to where they can get their car serviced or repaired or even modified.

I agree, most people won't classify looking at or modifying source code as usage (including me) but with the source code being open it does give people a greater choice of who to go to if they want it modified in some way.

But it is this attitude that ordinary people - people not like you,

Hey I'm ordinary. I'm married, two kids, work for a living, break wind in bed. :o)

People who just want stuff to work so they can forget about it

Well I feel like that too so I guess that does make me ordinary. I get annoyed when I try to help a friend with Vista and every time I run a wizard on its recommendation, it then asks me to confirm that I just asked it to do so! I want it to just work. I get fed up of telling my colleagues that the only solution to their problem is turn it off and on again--because I am unable to discover exactly why their application hung and then brought down the OS with it. I want it to just work--it's one of the reasons I use free software.

• find higly arrogant, which makes it more difficult to persuade them to try (and hopefully adopt) an alternative OS, office suite, browser, burner, music player, whatever.

I'm not so sure they find it arrogant--most of my non-techie friends find me amusing, eccentric and pedantic rather than arrogant (at least that's what they tell me). But you seem to have mis-understood why I made my comment. I was just clarifying what others were referring to when they said Opera was "non-free". It was more a case of making sure other people new to this concept understood the difference between zero cost and freedom and why we get so pedantic about it. It's a side effect of the same word (free) being available to describe both meanings and I agree it's confusing--that's why I commented.

The key is that it is not best if they adopt something which is open-source, it is best that people have choice, and use this choice. Again, perhaps this site is not exactly the place to be to find supporters for this view.

I think you'll find that a lot of people contributing and using this site would agree that choice is a very good thing. One of the complaints often made against free and Open Source software is that there is _too much__ choice. Want to install GNU/Linux: which distro from the thousands available should you choose? Install a typical GNU/Linux distro and see how many web browsers you get to choose from :o).

It's true that most people here probably believe that using FOSS is part of giving end-users more choice but (for me) this was never really about "Don't use Opera because it's non-free"--it was about clarifying that Opera's licence does not give users all the freedom you implied. For some that freedom is important for others less so. Choose to use Opera (or IE for that matter) if you want but we shouldn't confuse others by implying it has freedom in the same way that Firefox, Konqueror and others have.

cheers Ryan