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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 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!
lucm, indeed.
Statistical significance just means something is unlikely to occur by random chance. Said another way, it means there is evidence that it didn't happen by random chance, but not definitive proof. (This couching of conclusions is a mainstay of statistics.) Moreover, statistical significance doesn't necessarily translate to practical significance, but I didn't RTFA to find out if that was being claimed.
Douglas Whitaker
What does this seemingly never ending quest by people to formally define and declare who is best or smartest using various proxy measurements say about the people pursuing it?
Are they afraid they aren't smart enough and are looking for some kind of reassurance?
Maybe they want to make all the "not smart" people wear some kind of button. More likely, they just want to crow and be admired by other "smart" people.
Many "smart" people would be end up standing up in their own shit because they don't understand plumbing. Many "dumb" people end up running the company and making gazillions of dollars. "Smart" is what you do with your brains, not your brain itself.
Some people need to get a life.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh, wait ... Hmmm; this is a Safari window. I wonder how Safari users rank.
Maybe I should switch to one of my Chrome or Firefox windows, then I might get it right.
It might be interesting if we could get data on users that run multiple browsers. I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes, though I've previously found some that I didn't know I had, so I'm not sure how many more their might be. Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
Anyway, it could be interesting if people showed different math abilities when using different browsers. It'd imply that the differences are due to interference from the browsers' UIs, and not inherent in the individual users. I wonder how this study handle such possibilities. We already have good evidence that the programming language you use can help or hinder various sorts of reasoning ability, depending on the way they implement various capabilities. It wouldn't be too surprising if different browsers' UIs affected the ability of users to perform some mental operations. So we don't really know whether this study was comparing the users' math abilities, or the browsers' interference with their users' abilities.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"Average solving time as a percentage of the Chrome average (so smaller is better)"
Actually, the data were normalized against the Chrome speed for each category. That's not 100 seconds you're looking at, that's 100 percent of the Chrome rate. It's a weird way of displaying a graph, but if the author hadn't done it then the bars for the larger puzzle sizes would have (presumably) dwarfed the smaller ones, resulting in a loss of visible precision. I guess the more standard solution, using a logarithmic scale, either didn't occur to the author or was for some reason infeasible.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/iq-and-motivation/
So what the guy is really saying is that Chrome users are obsessive compulsives and I.E. users are normal.
Deleted
Yeah, my first thought was that maybe his site causes IE to crash sometimes, which would look like an abandoned game.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I'd like to see you actually act on your claims :)
If I use my Mac I use Safari. If I use my Fedora laptop I use Firefox. If use my Windows PC I use IE.
Any one of them works fine for me. If I can look at web pages and Bookmark/Favorite things it does 99.99% of what I want. I keep all my systems up to date, and run active AV of Windows. I'm not in the habit of viewing a wide range of shady web sites either. To top it off I can't think of a site I use that is not compatible with all three. And it is enough of a headache keeping 3 different systems up to date (nevermind the add virtual machines) without downloading extra browsers and making sure they're up to date separately.
Basically, who cares what browser you use. I doubt it defines you, me, or anyone else.
So, you're still stuck with Altavista, old pal? ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
So, you're still stuck with Altavista, old pal? ;)
Until altavista has proven to be reliable, I'll keep using Excite.
lucm, indeed.
Webcrawler forever!
If you're going to write a paper, put the relevant details in. What kind of statistical tests did you do? What correction for multiple comparisons did you do? What are the actual p-values you obtained, for each test? Are the distributions of your data normal? Do they meet the assumptions of your test?
Possibly, but my guess is that I would have had complaints from people.
Also note that this was data over two years, and I'm only using it from people who've successfully completed at least 10 timed puzzles of each size.
I see you're quite a good conversationalist; you must be quite a blast at parties. No, the claim that Javascript interpreter speed may have a role in browser performance is not easily testable because the author lumped different versions of the browsers together. It's possible that some obscure intermediary version of Firefox, for example, had an exceptionally poor performance, and that this skewed the data. I have in fact determined that Aurora 12.0a2 seems to have no performance difference between IE 8 on my laptop, but this does not necessarily mean, either, that IE 6 performance is entirely ignorable. Given the statistics for overall browser usage it would be exceptionally improbable that these have an overwhelming role in confounding results, but the landscape could still be measurably different as a result. Given that Javascript engine performance has increased dramatically as a priority for browser manufacturers in the past five years, this data incorporates information from a very broad set of configurations.
At any rate, I find it very disappointing that you chose to focus entirely on one statement about Javascript engines and not consider the rest of my post, or the larger significance of the point I was making. Instead you chose to attack (and violently, I might add) one relatively arbitrary theory when you could have contributed by gently stating any objections, before positing your own.
Here is an example of how to make a rebuttal correctly, for future reference: "over the span of a million data points from across the planet, it seems unlikely that network latency would have presented a bias towards one browser or another, particularly since the differences are on the order of magnitude of several dozen seconds, the application does not need to talk to the server for the player's experience to continue. To produce the kinds of bias observed given the nature of the application, Firefox users would have to be several times further from the Earth than the moon."
Perhaps the phenomenal absurdity of your suggestion explains why none of us are capable of thinking of it. Unless you meant to say network bandwidth, as in "IE users are all on dial-up, which is why they haven't spent the time to download a more secure browser, and it actually takes them 30 seconds to download the page," in which case I sincerely hope your entire post was made in jest, and that you have something better to do than make condescending remarks about intellect.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Tired of these "studies" that shows better apples uses a certain orange. Personally, I use Firefox and IE and find no difference between them. Sometimes something don't work on one of them, so I do it on the other. Considering IE comes as default on windows. Studies like this is like saying "Players who play games with default settings are stupid, and players who edit the settings are smart." Just because you have not found a need to change the settings dose not automatically mean your stupid.
IE is far more stable than Firefox. Now that is a little skewed, since FF is my normal browser. However FF does piss me off a fair bit by blowing up. When FF start to have problems with some content, I fire up IE and it handles everything no troubles. Of course this is all anecdotal, but then I've seen no evidence of IE being super crashy at work (we have some users who like it).
I think it is more MS haters wanting IE to be bad. They are worried IE might end up being a good browser and so hate on it.
a site were you can solve Calcudoku number puzzles.
Ahem.
And publishing your "paper" on your own website doesn't make it peer-reviewed either.
So am I expected to move to Chrome now so I can be part of some exclusive club to validate my IQ? Or move away from IE so people don't think I'm stupid? Maybe they should have called this study, "Chrome Users Are Most Insecure?"
MSIE's download progress bars lie 99% of the time, and just make something up the other 17%.
Can we trust the reported times for MSIE users to work these calcudoku puzzles?