Gmail!!!

Finally I got my gmail account today.well I was a bit disappointed to see that it used activex components and one cant access it from opera and most of the other browsers...google ppl have never done this partiality...so y now ? may be because most of the world uses internet explorer....(92% of the connected world is on windows with only 1% on linux) so what is the use of standard compliance...
??? (source of this info is http://www.google.co.in/press/zeitgeist.html)
linux may be a free operating system with good features but sometimes I feel it's worthless to spend so much time on linux ...afterall it's just another operating system which happens to be free ...but is it really ? linux does take up a lot of time to get fimiliar and configuration is difficult ...also the human interface is much weaker in linux than in XP ...hardware support sucks on linux and games are non existent ( i m not talking abt arcade stuff)...I installed linux on my system and for first few dayz it worked like anyhting the one fine day the network just went off ...i tried everything from googling to reinstalling the whole thing ...but nothing works ...believe it linux has not matured as a desktoiop system yet and by the time it does it would be just too late for it to become a operating system for masses..