UPDATE: It’s all a bizarre hoax. Techcitement is keeping this story up to show we can fall victims to this weird prank just as well as Gawker, CNN, and the BBC (who have removed the article from their site). Plus, Jon still thinks IE users are dumb and we think the image of the browser kids is too cute not to use.
AptiQuant, a psychometric consulting company located in Vancouver, has recently reported something that everyone already knew: IE users have a lower average IQ than other browser users.
The study provided free IQ tests to over 100,000 people and then charted the average IQ score against which browser the test was taken with. At the top of the IQ mountain were users of Camino, Opera, and IE with Chrome Frame. The second tier consisted of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users. And Internet Explorer users came in at dead last, the mentally slowest (on average) of all participants.
Fact: people with lower IQs are dumber than other people
This news is particularly unsurprising for anyone who has ever had any kind of software job. Oh, the hours that have been wasted by companies developing compatibility for not only the current version of Internet Explorer, but the outdated previous version as well (because such a large percentage of customers simply don’t upgrade or depend on their children to upgrade their browser). The reason companies waste time doing this? These happen to be the very same customers who pick up the phone and call customer service immediately to complain when anything on a website won’t work; and the squeaky wheel gets the grease, no matter how slow it may be. It pains me to say that I know from firsthand experience how many hundreds of man-hours are spent every week fixing software for IE instead of developing cool new technology.
You probably don't understand this if you're an IE user
Soapbox aside, it’s an interesting study and I’m curious about what this could mean on a larger scale. Does browser decision also indicate that people with higher IQs are more likely overall to customize their environment to suit their needs? Probably.
However, there is one thing I personally disagree with in the study: that any of this new, scientific, factual evidence will change the way software companies operate in the least. Then again, people with higher IQs have been shown to be more cynical on average, so hopefully I’ll be proven wrong.
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