We report on the browser market share here at Kingpin every month, because it’s important for site owners to know about online with browsers, so they can code their site and plan accordingly. Obviously, averages don’t often work for everyone. Owners of sites that see a tech savvy audience might see that Firefox and Chrome are being used far more often than Internet Explorer. It’s usually a matter of personal choice though.

While the fight for which browser is the best is something that’s normally contained in forums, this week has seen both the German and French governments urging their publics not to use Internet Explorer and to seek out a new web browser instead.

Microsoft has already admitted that an Internet Explorer 6 flaw could have been exploited by the human rights group responsible for recent attacks against some of the biggest names in the tech word including Google and Adobe.

Microsoft has now launched an urgent security patch in order to try and regain the faith of consumers.

General Manager at Microsoft’s Security Group, George Stathakopoulos commented on the need to release a patch outside of the regular monthly updates for the browser:

“Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability.

“We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update is the right decision at this time”

It seems a little too late now, and few companies can have a bigger reputation hit than a government urging their citizens not to use the software. Firefox looks likely to have gained a huge amount of ground in many European markets and has already overtaken Internet Explorer in Germany and Australia.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:01 amand is filed under Microsoft, Web Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.