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Chrome Users Are Best With Numbers, IE Users Worst
New submitter dr_blurb writes "After reading about last year's hoax report 'Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage' I realized I was in fact already running a real live experiment measuring number skills: a site were you can solve Calcudoku number puzzles. I analyzed two years' worth of data, consisting of over 1 million solved puzzles. This included puzzles solved 'against the clock,' of three different sizes. For each size, Chrome users were the fastest solvers, Firefox users came second, and IE users were the slowest. The number of abandoned puzzles (started but never finished) was also significantly higher for IE users. Analysis shows that the differences are statistically significant: in other words, they did not happen by chance. I put up more details and some graphs, and also wrote a paper about it (PDF)."
The users clearly aren't the only variable affecting the time it takes to solve these puzzles, of course. Part of the time difference may be due to the performance of the browsers themselves, and perhaps even due to the performance of the operating systems and computer systems these browsers are running on.
Take Chrome, for instance. Anyone who has used it will know that it's a much faster browser than Firefox or IE. In some cases, a page will take several seconds to load in Firefox, while the same page in Chrome will be nearly instantaneous, all other factors held constant.
After the game is started, do the Firefox and IE users sit there waiting for their browsers to respond, while the Chrome users are already solving the puzzles? If so, then the duration isn't necessarily a measure of the users' intellect. Rather, it's a measure of how much time they spend waiting for their browser to perform its work.
> The number of abandoned puzzles (started but never finished) was also significantly higher for IE users
As usual, Microsoft products users show more common sense: they are the ones that figure out quickly that the puzzles are a waste of time!
I'd have to point out that they are also the slowest to realize that using the default browser that came with their computer is a waste of time.