The academic community is also reluctant to adopt programs such as Firefox is that Microsoft actively markets themselves to students. As a student at Purdue, I could buy XP Pro and Office 2003 for a mere $20. They even sell their office software for macs at $12. Also, they've been whoring the tablet pc concept all over high schools around graduation time, when most kids have a laptop on their mind. They sell their software dirt cheap so that both they and the school can make a profit, and move their products. The school likes this too, because they'll do anythign to keep costs down for students, and they know that they've formed a relationship with a company that is dominant enough in to be the sole competitor in their market without being labeled a monopoly.

O yea, this is my first post.

The main problem is many websites are built for IE, for example to open my account from internet i have to have IE installed and use to give codes and password.
With linux i have no hope, they dont support Firefox or Konqueror

Tvan2105 - welcome to LQ and Go Boilers! (I'm one myself)

dyrer -- while it's true that some websites are "optimized" (??) for IE, if you are using KDE then as you probably know you can change how Konqueror reports its identity. Go to Settings > Configure Konqueror > Browser Identification, then choose whatever value you want, such as "IE 6.0 on Windows XP". Although the rendering may not be perfect, in my experience this usually works successfully. You might also want to ask those companies why they are forcing their customers to use software that is riddled with dozens of security vulnerabilities, and ask them if they consider computer security to be important. If they say No, take your business elsewhere, if they say Yes, then ask them why they refuse to allow their customers to have the option of using software (Firefox) which is inherently more secure than IE. Personally I refuse to deal with companies whose websites "require" Windows, and I think that if enough people complained, maybe things would change. Just my 2 cents, sorry for the rambling commentary -- J.W.

Just found out that Specsavers use Mozilla - seems as if their entire system is powered by an intranet? Couldnt make out whether it was Linux or windows - the theme on mozilla tooked very different, but it has almost similar top right buttons, and taskbar. Except it didnt say "start" at the left of the taskbar.

First company ive ever seen in UK use Linux (as in, first hand seeing, not reading or hearing about it).