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Of course we knew already for years that IE users are dumbest.

:-)

All of this has to be rewritten once Microsoft drops the IE brand...

Absolutely spot on.

I wrote a Calcudoku generator/solver a while ago (now in heavy use at http://www.calcudoku.org/ and spent a _lot_ of effort on the difficulty rating bits (and still know there is room for improvement).

One idea that isn't in there yet is to somehow incorporate the distance between the solving steps: if the next logical step is in a cell very near the previous one, you see it more quickly, hence the puzzle is easier.

IE 34.19%
Firefox 22.52%
Safari 21.38%
Chrome 14.80%
Android Browser 4.42%

Here are my numbers for a number puzzle site:

Chrome 30.67%
Firefox 25.36%
IE 23.94%
Safari 15.87%
Android 1.45%
Opera 1.21%

(also over the whole of 2012 so far, 443,255 visits, the site is http://www.calcudoku.org/

So quite different obviously. Maybe a set of ~ 10-50 "representative" sites should be picked (e.g. a few news sites, a few tech sites, popular blogs, etc.), and the numbers averaged over those?

And I'd be interested in the numbers of Fox News vs. the New York Times for example..

When a user enters a search in Chrome, the browser preloads an invisible tab not shown to the user, and these were being counted by StatCounter. Net Applications, another usage tracking group, ignores these invisible tabs and reports IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%."

Is this a slashvertisement for Net Applications? 54% for IE?? Did they grab their data from 2009?

Also, not all traffic is search traffic. The stats for the last two months at http://www.calcudoku.org/ (which has < 35% search traffic):

1. Chrome: 31%
2. Firefox: 25%
3. IE: 24%
4. Safari: 17%
5. Opera: 1%
6. Android: 1%

A dial-up modem in Britain takes about half a second, at most, to communicate with a server in Korea. (This is a generous over-estimate calculated from my experience with badly-coded Doom multiplayer servers.) No action on the part of the user in the game can cause a cumulative latency effect; the Javascript communicates with the server at regular intervals asynchronously to preserve the game's play state. Here is the code. Note where and how the XMLHttpRequest objects are used.

The maximum effect that latency can have on the game is that half a second, doubled to represent the start and end of the game. This cannot account for the additional 30 second difference in solving time between Chrome and Internet Explorer users, even if the figure of one half-second is underestimated by a factor of five. I have played the puzzles, and no, I cannot see where latency could come into play. Bandwidth, yes; that could slow down the loading time immensely, but not latency.

As for browser users in academia... well, that's a little more disappointing than you might imagine, but not entirely off, and I do agree with that idea as a whole. Gotta go now; will continue this chat later.

You may want to revise the paper to take into account the different use cases for each browser. If users of a certain browser are more likely to be distracted or interrupted (like at work, for instance), and similarly if users of a certain browser are more likely to be looking for an easy-to-digest diversion and abandoning some harder puzzles (like at work), this would invalidate the conclusions. Your statistics might say more about where different browsers are likely to be found rather than about the users of those browsers.

It'll be tricky to evaluate any kind of data by asking users.

On the site's forum, for example, there's been some back and forth about the influence of age. One user has set up a web survey to collect age data. But I can never be sure I'm getting correct numbers. At some point there'll be so much uncertainty in the source data, I can't derive anything anymore.

Now the mathematicians are done with Sudoku, start working on Calcudoku (which is like killer Sudoku, but with more operators and no restriction on puzzle size):

• how many different puzzles are possible, given a certain puzzle size and a distribution of cage sizes?
• how to deterministically create a puzzle with a unique solution?
• how to compute a measure of the difficulty level of a puzzle?
• how many (and which) clues are needed for a "single path" solution?
• ...

For example puzzles, see online Calcudoku puzzles.