If you’re online shopping for a new computer from Dell in the UK then you may need to watch what boxes you check or you could land up being charged nearly R300 (£16.25) just to have them install, the completely free, Mozilla Firefox browser.

The option is available on a Dell OptiPlex workstation which is aimed at corporates more than consumer and it seems to have only been offered on the UK site with some good news for South Africans in that, as far as we can tell, the same shenanigans aren’t being pulled on the local Dell website. Dell insists that the charge is not for the software itself, which is of course free, but rather for the time it takes for a service technician to install a custom system image that isn’t the factory standard one that it gets from Microsoft.

Installing Firefox is hardly a task that anyone would call tedious. After a 27MB download is initiated the Firefox website automatically redirects you to the page below where it gives you all of the knowledge you would need to have it up and running with minimal effort. The standard setup takes four clicks from start to finish and does almost all of the work for you which shows just how much Dell is gouging companies who opt for the option which can escalate prices on large orders rather drastically.

When contacted by TNW Mozilla’s Vice President and General Counsel Denelle Dixon-Thayer said that “There is no agreement between Dell and Mozilla which allows Dell or anyone else to charge for installing Firefox using that brand name,” “Our trademark policy makes clear that this is not permitted and we are investigating this specific report.”