Did they advise users to avoid Firefox, too? Their users would have avoided a lot of security pain.
On the other hand they have the power to intercept and analyze the complete data- and phone communication without anonymization. They of course use it not only to find malware and security risks, as was intended in the bill, but to provide 'suspicious' data to the police and intelligence services (http://www.golem.de/0901/64639.html).
We also have data retention for all communication data for six months and have planned a nice censorship infrastructure to block domains (against child pornography for now), not unlike Australia or China.
But at least IE has only 40% market share... (http://www.browser-statistik.de/)