victor - 7:01 pm on Mar 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

But why should schools pay for a browser software when IE and Netscape are still free and IE is pre-installed on every desktop anyway.

Why should I pay for a hotel room when I can sleep in the street for free?

These guys have done their sums and for them (maybe not for every one) the total cost of ownership is lower and/or the quality of use is higher with Opera.

IE costs more time and resources -- those endless security upgrades; being unable to have two copies installed at once, so testing and migration is harder; significant bugs in its CSS rendering -- which may be important for classes teaching web design; etc.

In my experience, the quality of use is higher with Opera: less crashes; more configurable options; better resources for those disabled visually or otherwise; marginally better non-english code page support; same rendering of a page on a PC and a MAC (IE can be quite different); better error reporting for Javascript bugs; way way faster in rendering and navigating; etc

Is all that worth a dollar to them? They obviously think so. I'd tend to agree.