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)."

Comments

Wrong conclusions

[lucm]

> 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!

Re:Wrong conclusions

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Or that they're wasting time at work, on a computer that they don't have admin rights to, so no installing extra browsers. Or they're kids using their parents computer. Or they now have a "good enough" browser so they don't care any more.

Re:Wrong conclusions

[Samantha Wright]

Then to avoid that contradiction, I propose a new hypothesis: IE users are the most likely to have something better to do than sit around all day solving puzzles. I think this really more suggests that Chrome users are the most bored.

Re:Wrong conclusions

[jamesh]

> 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!

Interesting conclusion. The more likely conclusion is that IE is likely to crash before a puzzle can be completed.

Re:Wrong conclusions

[marcello_dl]

Prejudice: An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts.

Facts, or better, google hits:
ie.crashes -> 27800000 results
chrome.crashes -> 35000000 results
ff.crashes -> 4.740.000 firefox.crashes ->1.810.000

So, according to Google itself, IE IS crashy, Chrome IS crashier.

Could happen by chance

[dwhitaker]

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.

Inadequacy

[sycodon]

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.

Re:Inadequacy

[tompaulco]

Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"..
People who are below average or at least who perform below average absolutely want everything to be equal. It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.

7th post!

[jc42]

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.

Re:7th post!

[Billly Gates]

Rule number one in science is never to form causation from generaliztion of data. Studies show that rap music makes you a better basketball player. Ice cream can give you heart attacks too. Why?

Statistically most NBA basketball players who are African American listen to rap music, therefore rap music made them great basketball players. The ice cream study was based on very hot days in New York when the temperature soared over 100 degrees. People tend to eat more ice cream on those days and there was also a rise of heart attacks. Therefore ice cream gives you heart attacks.

In Korea there are warning labels that fans give you heart attacks and there are settings to make sure they turn off at night as Koreans believe you can die if you leave the fan on at night. This is because when it is hot people have heart attacks and you can guess where the media made the conclusion.

It is silly and dangerous to make assumptions. You need a full hypothesis and use the standard scientific method to reproduce the results.

For all we know more old people use IE who are mentally further declined, or people went to that site at work when the boss wasn't looking and quickly alt tabbed and let the game time out when work needed them, etc. These are valid reasons and does not equate stupidity for people who use IE. Until we know more we just do not know. The work thing with IE is a very likely reason why a user would stop the puzzle as corporate America loves IE and users tend to hate work.

IQ correlates with motivation

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Is this just a measure of browser performance?

[mooingyak]

Yeah, my first thought was that maybe his site causes IE to crash sometimes, which would look like an abandoned game.

Re:I'd rather have HIV than use any Google product

[Yvan256]

Webcrawler forever!

Re:Is this just a measure of browser performance?

[dr_blurb]

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.