Indeed, but that is the best-of-the-best, nose-of-the-salmon part of Linux: it is rather closed, but at the same time it isn't. It is giving your parents (and your daughter in a few years) a stable, safe and closed-down environment as they need, while at the same time it is giving all the possibillities you are wanting.

Edit: If IE is like FF you should take a good look. In IE 7, the default safety settings are too low (at least in my case they were). And setting stuff in a way of your preference, is very troublesome (unlike in FF and Opera). The tabs in the settings window change in position, which is terrible IMHO. And IE 7 is way to slow, unless you put down all security settings and turn off the phishing filters. It is on my pc even slower then Opera 9 on my dad's (a midrange pc from 2001). Only with FF 2 and Opera 9, I experience any significcant advantage of my High-speed connection (10 to 20 Mb/s). And IE does not support more then 2 downloads a time, and does not show a tab or window with an overview of your downloads. In addition, FF and Opera work with the principle "New site, new tab" when I click on an external link (i.e. a link from one website to another). While in IE 7, the only way to that is right-clicking the link of that type and choosing for "open in new tab".
Thus, I do not agree to you Gazz. IMHO, IE 7 can not be called a FF-copy. Instead, I would like to say it is way behind its concurrence.

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