Chrome Users Are Best With Numbers, IE Users Worst 203
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)."
Wrong conclusions (Score:5, Funny)
> 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!
IQ correlates with motivation (Score:5, Funny)
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/iq-and-motivation/ [theness.com]
So what the guy is really saying is that Chrome users are obsessive compulsives and I.E. users are normal.
Re: (Score:3)
I might play Sudoku at work on a break and get distracted, never coming back (on IE). I play the same game at home on Chrome and quickly finish as my focus is there.
Statistically, that makes me "stupid" at work and "smart" at home. Don't let my boss find out!
Re:Wrong conclusions (Score:5, Funny)
> 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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I seriously doubt that very many people using Linux or Macs are using IE, and the first thing a Windows user does when the computer has the slightest glitch is reboot. Knowledgeable users know better, but few of them are using IE.
Windows users are used to rebooting, the rest of us aren't.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Release Year:
1995 - IE
2003 - FF
2008 - Chrome
Also, the Chrome folks have to be better with numbers to figure out what verion they're using while FF users only need to add 1 to their version number every few months. IE users don't get to use numbers much. When they copy their IE version into a support incident, the only real decision they need to make is yes or no to leave a large amount of data on the clipboard when finished.
Re: (Score:2)
windows.me.crashes -> 45,900,000
windows.7.crashes - > 50,600,000
macos.crashes -> 42,500,000
There we have it,
Re: (Score:2)
Then, win7 sucks. I guess you searched the internet archive, and compensated for the different amount of pages back in that time? I didn't need to do that as IE started first and sold parallel to chrome later.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have extra zeros there?
On a hunch I searched for "chrome crashes -bumper -rollbar" and only get 4,600,000 as the result count. Then I searched for plain old "chrome crashes" and got 5,600,000. I know that Google search results depends somewhat on the browsing history of the individual, but these are an order of magnitude lower than your results.
Re: (Score:2)
I use . to separate between words, and the FF search box on iceweasel
9.0.2 on debian sid
Today, same setup
ie.crashes has 27.900.000
and chrome.crashes 6.090.000
and ff.crashes 4.750.000
I am confident enough it was 30000000 when I wrote the comment because I ran it twice (I was surprised by the result myself)
FF lands me to the italian version of google because of my location.
If anything, this glitch shows that for serious things we should revert to usenet ASAP ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Whereas at work, I find that Chrome is the infinitely crashier one than IE (although Firefox beats them both out for sheer crashy shittiness).
Re: (Score:2)
The point was that ie crashes, by experience, not prejudice. Chrome and google's variable hits are an aside.
In my experience (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Have you missed your morning coffee or do think I was seriously suggesting that IE isn't stable enough to survive a 30 second puzzle??
I was responding to a thread that suggested that IE users left more puzzles unfinished because they think the puzzles are a waste of time, which was in turn in response to a FA suggesting that you can draw meaningful conclusions about intelligence from browser use. Why on earth do you think I was being serious?
I guess a smiley on the end would have made it clearer, but the jo
Re: (Score:2)
So, care to back that up with anything resembling facts? Or were you just being snarky?
This is Slashdot. Nobody here is ever snarky.
Re: (Score:2)
Their browser crashed before they could finish the puzzle.
Re: (Score:2)
You click the highlighted square and the first thing that happens is an immovable pop-up covers most of the puzzle.
I left it unfinished.
No that is Opera users (Score:2)
Opera users are not shown in the graph because their superior minds instantly analyzed all the puzzles and their solution in their mind so they had no need to "play" them through a browser interface.
Meanwhile lynx users just outsourced the puzzle solving to their legion of controlled IE user bots.
Re:Wrong conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong conclusions (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your all idiots, IE drops sessions more often than other browsers and that is all there is to this story.
"Your" very clever (like the 10 other people who made the same comment) but of course "your" the only one that is not an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
Your all idiots, IE drops sessions more often than other browsers and that is all there is to this story.
"Your" very clever (like the 10 other people who made the same comment) but of course "your" the only one that is not an idiot.
Sometimes I wonder if there is anything lower than a grammar Nazi - pointing out flaws in a system meant to communicate when there was not issue with the message being communicated as a result of the grammar utilized - yep, definitely more cleverer than you.
The real problem in your post was not the syntax, it was the fact that you insult people. If you say "your all idiots" you basically put an end to any kind of civilized discussion, at which point putting an emphasis on syntax is fair game.
Could happen by chance (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
There also seem to be potential problems with multiple testing [xkcd.com], but the paper doesn't go into enough detail to be sure.
In short, you shoul
Re: (Score:3)
No, the problem is your entire premise and conclusion are faulty. That's not even getting into your sampling bias and other issues. Getting a statistically significant result is meaningless with poor sampling. You also provide no figures on your sampling error so your claims are even less meaningful. So sorry, but this whole "study" is total bunk just like the hoax study was despite your attempt at "HURR HURR IE users are teh dumb!" conclusion you are attempting to claim.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
At some point there'll be so much uncertainty in the source data, I can't derive anything anymore.
Now there's a conclusion! :)
Re: (Score:2)
No, he's quite right. This study is chock full of errors and despite the claims of "statistical significance" he doesn't provide any effect size statistics to even show that his result is practically significant. It's just fanboi fueled nonsense.
Inadequacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Funny)
Of all the inappropriate places to post this :)
FWIW, I agree with the sentiment completely....
This is basically just a rehash of a good part of what Phil Greenspun blogged on years ago... who oddly would only be respected here based on personality cult factors alone.
Re: (Score:2)
Cool blog. Thanks for the tip!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Competition is a basic human need... the want to compete and come out on top is intrinsic in all of us. We want to come out on top of everything... including being associated with a group that comes out on top of another group.
This competition is one of the reasons pure communism can never work. Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"... what they mean by that is that they don't want others to have more than them (ie they want _more_ than others! ;-)
In the absence of compet
Re:Inadequacy (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.
Yeah, the only problem is choosing what categories we want to be rewarded for if we're above average in them. For engineers and scientists, it's often advanced problem-solving or technical skills. For business majors, it's often being able to get one over on the next guy. As far as I can tell, the only people who want IQ to be the main category for achievement are deadbeats who seemingly have no real-world skills but can manage to take entrance tests for high-IQ societies.
Everybody's above average at s
Re: (Score:3)
Oh the irony!
Re: (Score:2)
So... Now that you've gotten past the span filter, what do you have to say?
Re: (Score:2)
Aw, damn it; he must have said something smart that made the spam filter pay attention to him again!
7th post! (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re:7th post! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It just shows that people who use Firefox or Chrome tend to be smarter.
No, it doesn't show that at all. It provides no effect size statistics to back up such a claim.
This conclusion is an obvious one if you think about it.
No, it's not. The conclusion is only obvious because your a fanboi and nothing more. This is also why you idiots were fooled by the hoax study. The conclusion seemed correct only because it fed into your bias.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, by all means, lets have a larger study, then. However, I would still bet large sums of money that browsers that people have to go out of their way to find and use will tend to have smarter users than browsers that come by default with almost every computer. You don't have to get offended, just because this small sampling tends to back up what just plain makes sense. If you are an IE user, that doesn't make
Re: (Score:2)
Or, like someone else said maybe the IE users have more common sense and just leave the silly test early. Was a joke but still a good example of a real possibility you'd have to test and control for.
I know personally if someone says "Go try this test," I have a very short attention span for it. I'll answer some questions but more than about 10 or so and I'm done, don't care that much (I use FF though).
With something like this all you know is a correlation (presuming the data was statistically significant) a
Re: (Score:2)
I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes [...] Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
One OSX and two Debians. It appears to me that you are missing a significant browser market share (and I'm not talking about Lynx).
This being said, I'd be curious to see the user agent stats for nambla.org - maybe the FBI or NSA could tell us.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes [...] Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
One OSX and two Debians. It appears to me that you are missing a significant browser market share (and I'm not talking about Lynx).
This being said, I'd be curious to see the user agent stats for nambla.org - maybe the FBI or NSA could tell us.
The MacBook Pro can run Windows natively or in a virtual machine.
Re: (Score:2)
I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes [...] Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
One OSX and two Debians. It appears to me that you are missing a significant browser market share (and I'm not talking about Lynx).
This being said, I'd be curious to see the user agent stats for nambla.org - maybe the FBI or NSA could tell us.
The MacBook Pro can run Windows natively or in a virtual machine.
Makes you wonder why someone would pay that much money for a regular Intel CPU, 4GB of RAM and a cheap 5400 RPM hard disk then, especially when the same specs can be found in a Dell Vostro for less than half the price (including Windows).
Chrome solve time for all sizes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Here we go, found the actual data in the paper:
browser: 4x4 5x5 6x6
Internet Explorer: 30.9, 73.4, 262
Firefox: 29.4, 70.2, 245
Chrome: 22.0, 61.1, 233
Of course, this doesn't disprove the leading theory, which is that the analysis is total garbage. The number of potential mitigating factors (e.g. "Hey look, solving a browser-based puzzle game reflects the speed of the browser's javascript interpreter!") and alternative hypotheses (such as "IE users haven't invested time in changing their browsers, therefor
Re: (Score:2)
As well, unless the guy wrote a very bad program he's not going to st
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
You still aren't thinking about latency correctly. Browser users form communities, and those communities have certain characteristics. IE is default on all windows machines, it is the bottom, the start from which communities branch off because there has to be a stimulus to replace IE, even if that means replacing windows with linux where IE i
Re: (Score:2)
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 [calcudoku.org] is the code. Note where and how the XMLHttpRequest objects are used.
The maximum effect that laten
Re: (Score:2)
The first time i did a puzzle there was about a 5 - 6 second delay between completion of the puzzle and the pop up saying puzzle was correct. Dial up can actually have a lot better consistency than a cable connection. Whether or not this has an effect on the solve time I can't say because that code is horrible to look at, however, jus
Re: (Score:2)
Well, certainly there are subsections of said market. :)
I'm pretty sure the code has been automatically generated and automatically minified. Hence the illegibility. I'm pretty sure though that when a puzzle is solved, the duration can't be more than a whole HTTP interaction (which, I guess, is a few more packets than just a single ping, so perhaps the combined metric of latency and bandwidth can have a substantial effect.)
Re: (Score:2)
I do like your theory of IE as a base, from which people must migrate away. There are of course exceptions to user intention: the archetypal benevolent sysadmin "who takes away the dangerous blue 'e' " being one of them.
That being said, intelligent people don't just automatically migrate away from IE. Informed, interested people with a meaningful investment in the security of their computers do. Inherently that includes an age bias, an interest in computers (which is not the same as an interest in solving m
Re: (Score:2)
Science doesn't work by pushing conclusions based on correlations from a study that has huge sampling bias and no effect size statistics to prove that the conclusion is even practically significant. If what the submitter was doing is what you consider science then... wow... we are more doomed then I thought.
Yawn, who cares. (Score:3)
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.
Another take, from a Firefox user (Score:2)
The number of abandoned puzzles (started but never finished) was also significantly higher for IE users.
Or, perhaps, IE users were more likely to have a life away from their computer. Maybe they abandoned the puzzle because they had to get ready for one of those "dates" - something Chrome users may have read about on Wikipedia.
Correlation, casuation, etc... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The causation probably is: More educated or intelligent people have learned about Chrome and have switched.
The default browser on the most widespread system is always the one that will have the least sophisticated users.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Need more details (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I see, not reading it on my phone, you do have a little section on the statistical test buried in the fourth part of the first results section.
You don't mention correction for multiple tests, and you did quite a few. If you included p-values (which is why it's important to do so), the reader could estimate whether your results are actually significant or not. If your p-values are not quite a bit smaller than 0.05 then your results are not actually significant.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that even if his results were statistically significant it doesn't necessarily mean he has found a meaningful result for the population at large. You can get statistically significant results which have no practical importance. The fact that there is no mention of the sampling error rate or any other meaningful data in which one can use to derive the practical significance of his data is quite telling on how this is a poorly-done study.
Re: (Score:2)
There are always study design and interpretation issues, especially with convenience samples, but if you don't have significant results to start with, there's nothing more to discuss.
And... (Score:2)
Those of us who use all three (IE 'cause I have to at work) are confused.
Regression to the mean ? (Score:2)
On the other hand, I don't use Chrome, so my maths may not be as high good as my Englishin' and grammarin' is.
tired (Score:2)
/sigh (Score:3)
a site were you can solve Calcudoku number puzzles.
Ahem. [wikipedia.org]
And publishing your "paper" on your own website doesn't make it peer-reviewed either.
Re: (Score:2)
well.. slashdot is the peer review.
welcome to future, hypnotoad at 11.
So? (Score:2)
highly suspect on the MSIE times (Score:3)
Can we trust the reported times for MSIE users to work these calcudoku puzzles?
I love non-concluding stats (Score:2)
ok, so those who are good with numbers prefer chrome. those who are good in math prefer star wars over women. therefore, prefering star wars over women is better just like prefering chrome over IE is better. wait.
smart people make fewer mistakes, but those mistakes tend to be longer.
Absolutely Dumb Premise (Score:2)
Or it could be ... (Score:2)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bneajlpihgbinpbljjcadddjljghilho [google.com]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sudoku-helper/?src=search [mozilla.org]
Could be another answer. I don't see any mention as to whether it tracked what addons/extensions were in use at the time, but this is something that could easily be gamed.
Re:Is this just a measure of browser performance? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, my first thought was that maybe his site causes IE to crash sometimes, which would look like an abandoned game.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough. That certainly reduces the likelihood of my theory.
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, it really depends on the page - for me, with a slow internet connection(1.5mbps), FF loads it faster than chrome... if it's /not/ HTTPS. If it's encrypted, Chrome loads it faster, especially if the site's under massive load(Like Ebay when the last HP Firesale happened)
This is on Linux, with a 3.2ghz quad-core, 4GB-of-ram hulk of a system, so it's not system-performance dependant or being starved for ram.
Re: (Score:2)
HP Firesale
That would be a great name for a SAN solution or something. I had to think quite hard to get what that it actually was something else. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Hm... Interesting you should mention that: /modern/ AMD CPUs that shouldn't cause issues - it's only on older generation AMD that less effecient code is run.
On Linux, FF offers HW acceleration... If you have the Nvidia blob driver installed. Just about everything else is blacklisted by default.
Stock FF seems to be compiled using the Intel compiler, but on
That being said, I've been using Iceweasel - debian's unbranded firefox - which appears to be compiled with GCC, and it appears to be slightly faster... Bu
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
So, you're still stuck with Altavista, old pal? ;)
Until altavista has proven to be reliable, I'll keep using Excite.
Re:I'd rather have HIV than use any Google product (Score:4)
Webcrawler forever!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Are members of MSA (Microsoft Shills Anonymous) even allowed on Slashdot?
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome users are the type to have a sufficiently narrow set of abilities that they can solve silly puzzles but they can't conceive of a problem with one large corporation collecting huge amounts of data about people across the world.
It's sorta like seeing that IQ correlates with financial success, where financial success by definition requires a willingness to amass financial wealth and mostly depends on high skill in a very narrow set of abilities.
Could you say "narrow set of abilities" once more, I'm really getting in a kinky mood
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would guess that something like uzbl would have users with the biggest dicks on average. One female user pulls down the average as much as one 12-inch user pulls it up. You need to find the browser with the highest male-to-female ratio.
(why the fuck am I writing this)