Mozilla Firefox browser is a close second choice to Internet Explorer in Europe, even overtaking the Microsoft browser in countries such as Germany and Austria, analytics company StatCounter said. Firefox’s current market share stands at 40 percent, compared to Microsoft’s 45 percent share, reported the BBC today.

Firefox challenging Internet Explorer.

Warnings by the German and French governments last week about the vulnerability of  Internet Explorer helped Microsoft’s rival browsers to gain ground, even though web experts considered the Microsoft software flaws not particularly serious, reported The Financial Times. There was a considerable surge in the number of Firefox downloads in Germany at the end of last week, according to the Google Trends website. A sharp rise was also recorded in Switzerland and Austria, with more modest increases in Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the UK.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it would release an emergency software patch to fix an alleged hole in the Internet Explorer browser that enabled Chinese hackers to attack Google’s e-mail accounts last week, reported Dow Jones Wires.  The US company usually releases software updates at a set time each month, but was urged to take extraordinary action after “the significant level of attention this issue has generated”.

In the wake of the cyber attack, allegedly caused by Chinese hackers, that damaged over 30 web companies including Google and Adobe, the general manager of Microsoft’s trustworthy computing security group, George Stathakopoulos, recommended Internet Explorer 8 users to keep updating their software in order to benefit from the improved security protection it offers.