Crud
Now I have to switch from Firefox to Opera so I can feel better about myself
Update: This survey discussed in this story was apparently a hoax. You can read more here. A comprehensive study of web users has determined that the dumber you are, the more likely you are to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. After measuring the IQs of exactly 101,326 users and correlating their scores with the browser they …
Seriously: get Opera. It's very, very good. I started using it a couple of years ago when Firefox kept getting slower and slower and I've never looked back.
Looks much better than FF in Linux too, IMHO. Also, I got rid of Dunderbird mail client and just use Opera's built in one which is more than adequate. Saves about 400MiB of memory.
I know it might be hard to believe, but it's true, intelligent people are intelligent enough to explore alternatives, and understand the simple concept that the most POPULAR products are rarely also the BEST products...
I'm guessing many here are suffering from the Dunning–Kruger Effect, where they are too stupid to realise how stupid they actually are, and vastly overrate their own intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Clearly anyone thats bothered to fully explore alternatives to what their OS comes with, will come to likely conclusion that Opera is clearly the browser of choice based on performance, reliability, features and security track-record. You know tangible criteria to rate something against.
Nitwit, let me explain it for you.
Whether conservatives are more likely to be dumb than leftists (such as Communists) or not, the outcome of the leftists "intelligence"+worldview is horrific compared to the much more congenial product of more conservative frameworks.
Who? Anyone who classifies Obama as a Marxist, Fascist or Nazi . Or a tar baby.
Where? I don't understand the question. Above their own shoes, but below their own hats. Am I expected to geoip the lot of them for you?
Oh ... wait. You think the Tea Party are moderates? The people so far on the right that American conservatives are disowning them? The people whose only mission is to bring Obama down, no matter the cost to America or the wider world? Those people. They're not extremists?
There was a time when I would try to be more 'diplomatic' about such a statement and try to avoid the word, "stupid" in favor of, "ignorant." But watching America's crumbling infrastructure aided by the solid public support of the Bush administration and the current level of Tea Party extremists' control of Congress, I stand corrected. The word, "stupid" IS being diplomatic as it doesn't really represent what's actually going on.
Given that this is a forum for an IT website, and in most surveys IT workers are shown to have a conservative bias, we must conclude that the majority of thumbs up votes here are by infiltrators from other professions. Probably Sociology and Political Science graduates employed in government non-jobs at great expense, with bags of time on their hands to spend commenting on forums all day while the rest of us do the real work.
It would be interesting to see a graph showing time of day versus frequency of thumbs up and thumbs down votes, and whether they originate from .edu / .ac.uk / .gov / .gov.uk or .com / .co.uk etc.
Another thing worth considering, is that many users are forced to use IE at work or on public terminals while very few people are forced to use the other browsers. As such, most of the non-ie browser users explicitly chose to use their given browser, while a proportion of the ie-users don't have the choice.
It would be interesting to see if the stats could be updated to see the IQ of people who chose to use IE, i imagine the average IQ would be even lower.
I'd think that the IE with Chrome Frame users are those who have to use IE(6) at work (undoubtedly for some horribly coded but business-critical web app) and have put Chrome Frame on to ease the pain.
After all, Chrome Frame isn't very well advertised. If you don't keep up to date on the big G's blog and developments, it's highly likely you wouldn't have heard of it, so I'd say those users are more tech-savvy than your typical office grunt and are just trying to make IE a little less painful to live with.
I force people onto IE here at work simply because of GPOs. Chrome frame has been beaten out of the network (it is a "virus" here according to the AV....). Sadly that is the way of the policy. (No you cant use pocket opera either).
Internet is almost whitelisted too. Except for me, I use the unfiltered server proxy of course.
Blast appears using the ad supported version meant I was very dumb. But still tabbed browsing and session saves without some kak add-in back then was more important to me than some small banner ad. Although Netscape was around I didn't like it hence why I used Opera.
Then again it doesn;t state if this was desktop browsers only or all browsers for devices such as mobile phones where Opera is a decent choice in my view.
Many of those who it would not be reassuring to either don't care or may not even undesatand the assertion.
Of course, this does depend on the accuracy of it.
Of course we may hear things like "I know someone with an IQ of 180 and they only use IE." It is a statistical correlation not straight either/or.
and forward the results of the study to Dell and Cisco who are forcing users of some of their products (web management interfaces of some switches or wireless equipments, SSL VPN etc.) to use IE only.
In this case it's not only the users of IE but also the developers forcing us to use IE that are victims of low IQ scores.