Firefox, Opera Downloads Soar After IE Warnings

From PC World: Mozilla yesterday reported a "huge increase" in downloads of Firefox in Germany after that country's computer security agency urged users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to dump the browser and run a rival instead.

German downloads of Firefox during a four-day stretch starting last Friday jumped by about 300,000 over normal, said Ken Kovash, Mozilla's director of analytics, on the company's "Blog of Metrics." "Over the past few days there has been a huge increase in the number of Firefox downloads from IE users in Germany," Kovash claimed.

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software said that downloads in Germany of its desktop application were double the usual rate last weekend, and downloads in Australia were up 40% over normal.

Mozilla and Opera cited recommendations by German, French and Australian authorities to stop using IE as the cause for the jump. Last Friday, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security , known by its German initials of BSI, and France's CERTA each called for users to stop running IE until Microsoft patches a critical vulnerability. "Pending a patch from the publisher, CERT recommends using an alternative browser," a translation of the French advisory stated.

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