People in Germany Are Switching Browsers
Ken Kovash 
Last Friday, an agency of the German government issued a warning against the use of Internet Explorer. What has been the impact on Firefox and the Mozilla community? Looking at the chart below, we can see that over the past few days there has been a huge increase in the number of Firefox downloads from IE users in Germany. The orange area is meant to represent the “incremental” impact, i.e., the number of downloads beyond what we would have normally expected on those days. As the chart highlights, the orange area adds up to just over 300,000 downloads during the recent Friday-Monday period.
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Ken, please post the data for the french users when you have some cycles. The french CERT issued same warning and we’d love to see how it affected the market share. Thanks !
I wish my Government do like this too.
I like it
. If an average of 50.000 users will download FF in the future in about 1600 days all people in Germany would be provided with the best browser in the world.
I love the Firefox and think that is now the beast browser.
The Australians did too: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/19/2795684.htm
Could you get the US convernment to do this please? Thanks…
You think that really all people in Germany do use a Personal Computer?
I think people will be a lot safer for switching to Firefox.
I wish my Government issues a warning about Internet Explorer’s vulnerability too.
People in Germany Are Switching Browsers
All I can say people in Germany are smart.
I found most users used firefox than internet explorer because it is faster. And now because of the problem of internet explorer most users used internet explorer will go firefox and other browser. Microsoft must fix this problem ASAP. Sikat ang Pinoy
“All I can say people in Germany are smart.”
If they were smart, they would have been using Firefox from the beginning
As this growth in downloading happened over the weekend these are home computers not office ones – I wonder what is happening in the work environment? Does the following Monday to Friday period show a similar trend? Or will it once Firefox passes any internal testing required before companies roll it out?
What’s funny is that it’s not the first time that CERTA and BSI issued a warning against IE, and they used this time no stronger word than previously (their recommendation is actually only temporary, until IE is fixed). There seems to be a threshold of popularity were such a message has much more effect. If so the influence in France will probably be weaker than in Germany (Germany has a quite higher user of Firefox from start).
Hi Andreas,
You’re right.
I’m sitting in Germany and not using a Personal Computer.
Just playing with my laptop
Great, but also great that Opera also participates. I think the goal should not be a market share of 100%. Not for IE, not for FF and nobody else, since a mono culture is not fruitful enough, nor is is a particular safe setting. Anyhow I still like my grown up Phoenix and hope that FF will evolve further!
@Andreas: Over 95% of all Germans DOES has a PC and internet access!!! Does Americans believe that people in other countries lives on the back side of the Moon??? Germany is -technologically- much more ahead than the U.S. in many ways.
There is even a follow-up on the ministry’s warning about the security issues of Microsoft’s internet browser. On January 20th the BSI published a warning about security problems of Windows’s mail programmes (Outlook 2000, 2003; Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live – in fact all of Windows’s mail software) and the operating system in general. Interestingly, it did NOT recommend to use any alternative OS. Is Microsoft’s lobbying power to big to tell consumers that there are other (definitively better) operating systems around? What about Linux or Mac OS?
But I guess computer users should realize themselves that Microsoft’s products are best to be left alone. Are we so immature or lazy that we need government to tell us which software to use?
Hi Sergio,
Firefox is used in Germany by more users than IE, at least most Germans are smart. Is IE really most popular in other countries?
Why is the download button not highter at http://www.mozilla.com/de/ ?
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ says that only 98% see it fully???
HI Feuerfuchs Fan,
Not anymore. In CIS(Russia, Ukraine Belarus etc) Opera is very popular.
Here is yesterday’s statistics of popular in Ukraine portal I.UA
MS Internet Explorer 151’033 36.0%
Opera 149’260 35.6%
Firefox 110’933 26.4%
Others 25’186 6.0%
Oh how I love the Germans a day like this! I hope my government (Sweden) will do the same some day. It seems that Germany are ahead of us though.
By the way, you should visit my website!