Stupid is as stupid does with IE user hoax ‘study’

The other day I was reading through the CNN site when I came across an article entitled “Are Internet Explorer users dumb?” It references a Vancouver, B.C.-based psychometric consulting company — which was revealed today to be a hoax — that claims to have given an IQ test to 100,000 people, and the results indicated that IE users scored less than average compared to users of other browsers, who tested as slightly above average.

I mulled this over for a day or two and wanted to respond in my column but decided to drop it. I thought, “This is exactly the kind of tabloid tech journalism that I’ve spoken out against for years. Why bother with a trip to the gutter?” — until my InfoWorld colleague Robert X. Cringely decided to jump on the “IE users are stupid” bandwagon. It must have been a slow week for technology that he would champion this prejudicial and utterly idiotic study. It’s offensive. And the fact that so many tech journalism sites played up this story without verifying the alleged consulting company’s existence shows who’s really stupid.

Cringely, I’m an IE user, and so are many people in this world. At the office, my company dictates we use the browser because in a corporate world it is much easier to control than the competitors in an Active Directory environment through group policies. But at home, I use it by choice.

Throughout the years, I’ve tested and worked with every browser. For several years I used Firefox extensively, and my wife still prefers that browser. But after it crashed for the billionth time on my system, I decided that it was time to return to Internet Explorer. Gone were the woes of IE6 and IE7, and I was happy with the many new features of first IE8 and now IE9. Granted, Firefox has an incredible set of add-ons that I loved to test and play with, but I never used them on a day-to-day basis.

Additionally, Chrome is small, sleek, and fast — if you need to recoup nanoseconds, which is really the inconsequential difference in speed between the browsers these days. For the record, there are plenty of reasons that IE is a smarter choice than Chrome and Firefox.

I imagine the more important aspect of intelligence comes from what you are reading through your browser, not the browser itself. “Studies” such as the Canadian one are no more than old-fashioned bigotry.

I’m all for numbers. I enjoyed the book “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which uses statistics to present theoretical reasons for those numbers. “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell is another example of statistical reasoning to present conclusions that may seem outlandish or uncommon.

But to go so far as to call people stupid or dumb based on irrelevant data is, well, stupid and dumb. I’d like to know where these 100,000 people came from, what they do for work, the extent to which they use the Internet, and for what. But I guess if we did any real investigation it would make the study worthless — or more worthless, I should say.

But the idiocy is not contained to the publicity-seeking “research” firm. The comments on the trash-talking stories are also idiotic. I especially love reading the posts of those allegedly smarter, non-IE-using commenters who crow, “Either they don’t know about other faster and secured browsers or they don’t give a bleep.”

The speed advantage is certainly in the hands of Chrome at this point. But it’s easy to be fast when you sport fewer features. But security? You might be surprised to learn the truth on that one. One report that is worth reading comes from security company Secunia, which says IE suffered fewer common vulnerabilities and exposures in the past year compared to Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Dana Simonson, who claims an IQ of 165, puts the browser psychometric “issue” in meaningful perspective in her comments on Cringely’s har-de-har-har post:

I do not find it of significant consequence as to which browser I use. IE is still installed as my default browser simply because it arrived that way and I have had no inclination to bother changing it. Yes, I have installed Firefox, Safari, and Chrome and use them when the situation dictates, but such situations are rare.

On average, I allocate approximately 20 minutes a day to use of the Internet. This usage is primarily limited to retrieval of information, initiation of purchases, and, as in the case with this column, as a viewpoint into the humorous perspectives of passionate individuals. In my perusal of commercial sites, I have encountered more pages that have been optimized (or bastardized, depending on your viewpoint) for IE than for other browsers.

For the conclusion to be justified, randomly selected groups would need to be provided with computers preloaded with each of the browsers. After some uniform period of time, examination of the groups would reveal those who were inclined to change the default browser. If only these individuals where examined, then a correlation might have some credibility.

That about sums it up. The study lacks credibility. And anyone getting into that boat might just have lost some credibility along with it.