IE users have a lower IQ (Hilarious survey)

UPDATE: IT HAS SINCE EMERGED THAT THE STORY, AND COMPANY, WERE A FAKE

A consulting firm called AptiQuant has run some IQ surveys across 100,000 people. Pretty useful – though I’ve always found that websites that try and work out my IQ seem to get confused and give me really low scores (on the last one I get 160). This company ran the survey, but to be useful, also collected data on which browser the participants were using. The result was that users using Internet Explorer tended to have a lower IQ than those using better browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and a browser based on Firefox called Camino. Opera and Camino users tended to have above average (>100) IQs whilst the other browsers’ users were generally average (100).

Reading through the article on BBC News – currently the second most read article – the firm suggests that rather than Internet Explorer actually lowering people’s IQ it was just that people with lower IQs tended to be using Internet Explorer in the first place. But what if it was the other way round, and IE did actually lower people’s IQs:

• The slow browsing experience means that there is less time to look up new interesting things
• The number of ads for better browsers confuses the audience and so lowers their IQ
• The already low IQs mean that people don’t understand they need to download a better browser

Of course, I don’t doubt that this is not necessarily true, however I thought it was fun anyway. My ultimate suggestion to get people off of Internet Explorer is for someone like Google to stop throwing ads everywhere but to setup an advertising campaign where there is a ‘Chrome day’ where you have to get a friend using Internet Explorer off of it and onto Google Chrome. People are more likely to listen to their friends than to ads on the internet, so it could be useful…

Browser Success

The above graph from Wikipedia shows the top six methods for browsing the internet: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Mobile Web. Roughly looking at these graphs we can see that there is a steady pattern: Internet Explorer is losing users, Firefox and Opera are staying steady, and Safari, Chrome and Mobile Web are gaining users, Chrome is gaining rapidly. By mid-2011 I see it as fairly likely that Internet Explorer usage will have probably dropped below 40%, and by mid-2012 Google Chrome will have over-taken both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you’d asked me six months ago I would probably have said that by the end of 2011 IE will still be the most used, but Chrome will have more users than Firefox.

It is hardly a surprise that Internet Explorer is rapidly losing users, it is struggling to stay ahead and despite that desperate TV marketing campaigns, it is clear that Internet Explorer is on the demise, with Google sticking a Chrome ad on pretty much every Google owned site, including Google ads. Firefox is also now the most used browser in Europe, but I think one day Firefox will also die a death.

As for Safari getting more users, that can only be down to more Mac sales.

Everyone’s making a browswer (really often)

In the past couple of days Microsoft has started to announce platform previews for Internet Explorer 10. There had already been rumors about IE10 following the release of some suspected Windows 8 screenshots, and it is thought that the browser will be designed with touch/tablet support – though that is hardly a surprise.

I think it could be said as a surprise that Microsoft is already releasing platform previews of IE10, considering that IE9 was barely released a few weeks ago and most of us haven’t even got round to installing it (I have managed to some how get away with the fact I have the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera on my computer, but no IE). The current IE10 test drive is just a platform preview and doesn’t show what the browser will be like in the future, it just shows what kind of features it will have. It seems to come with a very similar array of HTML5 capabilities to Firefox 4, which is fantastic, however it is the first browser to drop any support for Windows Vista, it only runs on Windows 7 at the moment.

Perhaps this is the first stage of Microsoft saying goodbye to Windows Vista, the devil OS. IE9 was not released for XP purely because XP doesn’t have support for some of the hardware requirements that IE9 has like DirectX 10 and Aero, however I find it a little non-nonsensical that Microsoft aren’t giving Vista support considering it is based on exactly the same architecture. I am not complaining of course, however I find it a very unusual decision by Microsoft, I get the feeling Microsoft are finally giving up on Vista at last.

I am not actually particularly worried about Microsoft releasing the IE10 preview, because they aren’t the only browser developers to be moving towards more frequent updates, and if Microsoft releases IE10 within about six months (which is what it took IE9 from platform preview to release) it will be one of the fasted IE releases ever. However, Firefox and Chrome both take this model. Chrome is now released about every month and a half, and the beta seems to updated every couple of weeks – though I can’t remember exactly how long it is. Mozilla is also considering a similar model, with Firefox 5, 6 and 7 potentially being released this year.

The advantage of frequent updates is that you are always guaranteed to get a secure product, but the only other benefit that I can see is that you are getting the best HTML5 support possible – which is useful from a competition point of view. I think that, ultimately, competition is at the heart of it because it is what has left Microsoft behind, IE simply doesn’t have the best support whereas Chrome does and it is released the most often. I think that once HTML5 is standardized, whenever that time comes, the frequent updates may slow slightly, but another situation could arise in which there is no standard specification, however there is an open – perhaps wiki based – standard that developers can contribute to, like the model W3C is using at the moment. The risk of this is having another Internet Explorer like browser where the developers just add more and more unnecessary features that are only supported in one browser.