German "dump IE" warning results in huge increase in Firefox downloads

Thanks to the German government's warning to IE users to dump the browser due to the recently discovered vulnerability, Firefox has seen a huge increase in downloads.

According to Ken Kovash, Mozilla's manager of analytics, downloads of the browser have jumped some 300,000 since last Friday.

... 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.

Here's the chart:

300,000 extra downloads over a few days, all with no advertising, and all thanks to the German government. I bet Mozilla are well pleased with that result. Given this IE security scare, I think it'll be really interesting to see what effect all this has had on browser usage share for January.