German government urges public to stop using Internet Explorer
(Reuters) - The German government urged the public on Tuesday to temporarily stop using Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer following discovery of yet-to-be repaired bug in the web browser that the software maker said makes PCs vulnerable to attack by hackers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Berlin has done this before. In December 2008 it told IE users to switch browsers over a zero-day flaw, and its January 2010 warning measurably moved the market — Firefox usage jumped after that advisory. So Tuesday's call to stop using Internet Explorer is a repeat play by a government that has already demonstrated its warnings shift real user behavior.
What makes this round sharper is timing: Ars Technica reported just the day before, on September 17, that the unpatched bug was under active attack, and Microsoft itself confirmed PCs are vulnerable with no fix available yet. The story traveled fast — The Register, CNET, Computerworld, Krebs on Security and others all picked it up within a day.
First-order effects
- German consumers and enterprises face an immediate choice between switching browsers or applying Microsoft's interim workarounds while the exploit is live in the wild.
- Microsoft is under pressure to break its monthly Patch Tuesday cadence and ship an out-of-band fix for a hole it concedes is actively exploited.
Second-order effects
- Rival browsers stand to gain share in Germany specifically, where the 2010 precedent shows a federal warning converts directly into downloads for alternatives like Firefox.
- Each public advisory erodes the default position of the browser bundled into Windows, raising the cost to Microsoft of leaving critical flaws unpatched between update cycles.
Third-order effects
- If governments keep issuing switch-browser advisories whenever a zero-day goes unrepaired, browser selection becomes a matter of official security guidance rather than personal preference — a structural check on any dominant default browser.
- Recurring unpatched-flaw episodes strengthen the case among enterprises for third-party browsers as standard issue, decoupling desktop security policy from whatever ships with the OS.
The trend: National agencies are increasingly willing to publicly advise abandoning a dominant default browser during live zero-day incidents, turning browser choice into de facto security policy.