The German and French warnings are a bit of a puzzle, since they imply that they are in response to recent malware attacks that the AV experts say attack only servers, and don't have (or haven't yet had) any observed presence in "user machines."

One might surmise that the German and French governments making the recommendation might just be too lazy to provide secure servers, so they hope to pass the burden of keeping them safe by passing the inconvenience to individual users(?).

There's no problem with finding other browsers to use; but especially if you're using WinXP or earlier it is true that IE is "intimately connected" to other parts of the OS, and shares too many utilities used by other things (esp Windows Explorer, which is prety handy) to be "removed" in any real sense. If you use Windows, you need to keep IE up to date even if you don't use it.

If there's anything they should be warning about, it would be Flash, Adobe PDF, and Java (popups and popovers), since these are currently the most notorious "malware vectors" in circulation. Flash and PDF updates in response to known vulnerabilities have been obscenely slow, and sites using some Java devices (invariably for annoying ads) are being found containing far too many "page faults" (coding errors) that are easy to exploit.

John