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Upgrade your browser - the more intelligent option
I PROGRAMER ^ | 31 July 2011 | Janet Swift

Posted on 07/31/2011 6:36:07 AM PDT by KyGeezer

Results from an online IQ test taken by over 100,000 people have been reported as indicating the users of Internet Explorer have low IQ and have provoked some IE users to threaten legal action. But the study's findings are valuable ammunition for web developers.

A Canadian company that designs, validates and publishes psychometric tests for recruitment, career guidance and staff development, released its report Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage and found itself at the centre of a storm.

The survey findings were reported by Jared Newman on PC World with the headline "Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid" and as his story spread AptiQuant started to receive hate mail from IE users.

In an attempt to defuse the situation Leonard Howard, AptiQuant's founder and CEO said,

"I just want to make it clear that the report released by my company did not suggest that if you use IE that means you have a low IQ, but what it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer."

And if a quick look at the chart below shows that this is indeed the case. There are three clusters - a below average one comprising all the versions of IE, one that is slightly above average comprising Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and a final one that is again significantly better with three minority browser choices, IE with Chrome Frame, Camino and Opera.

(Excerpt) Read more at i-programmer.info ...


TOPICS: Technical
KEYWORDS: ie; iq
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To: Little Pig

LOL! Mmmm... glue....


81 posted on 07/31/2011 11:11:55 AM PDT by roamer_1 (Globalism is just socialism in a business suit.)
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To: KyGeezer

Like others, I’m running FF 5 on a Win7 machine. No problems loading — works like a champ. My only issue is (and this isn’t FF’s fault) that Verizon’s web page doesn’t load properly. After much time expended with their tech support in trying to figure out why I couldn’t access my address book, we concluded that it doesn’t work with FF — only with IE. So I pulled it up in IE — no problem. Still, I like FF better than IE. Not as cluttered, easier and quicker to use.


82 posted on 07/31/2011 11:12:12 AM PDT by Fast Moving Angel (If he has nothing to hide, why is he spending so much $$$ hiding it?)
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To: KyGeezer

I’ll bet that the same thing can be said about Burger King. The more you “have it your way”, the higher your IQ. People who get their burgers with the standard condiments have low IQ and people who know they want something different, and ask for it, have high IQ.

Also, milk. Those with low IQ take the jugs with old expiration dates, those with high IQ take the jugs with recent expiration dates.

I don’t think there is much info here once you remove the noise.


83 posted on 07/31/2011 11:12:12 AM PDT by Born to Conserve
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To: KyGeezer

Chrome.
Fast, light, secure.


84 posted on 07/31/2011 11:22:07 AM PDT by gitmo (Hatred of those who think differently is the left's unifying principle.-Ralph Peters NY Post)
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To: Fantasywriter
All I can tell you is that my ex, the tech wiz from MIT, had no use for Apple. He just found it underwhelming, and from what I could see, from years of living in the MIT milieu, his fellow super-techies felt the same.

Yeah, but I'll bet you they weren't running Windows either. Linux? Ubuntu?

As for IE, the only browser that was a bigger pain in the hiney to design webpages for was Netscape, years ago. Microsoft has generally felt that IE never needed to be compliant with W3C specs nor handle cutting edge cascading style sheet (CSS) code, although IE9 is much closer to playing with industry standards than *shudder* IE6 and other earlier versions.

I can't be fair without pointing out that Mozilla (Firefox) also has its own version of certain CSS codes. Which means you code your page to industry standards, then write special rules for IE6+, then a few special rules for Mozilla, all the time knowing that certain parts of your design just won't be handled by any IE.

85 posted on 07/31/2011 12:43:21 PM PDT by Scoutmaster (You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.)
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To: Scoutmaster

Afaik, not one of them used Windows. I heard about Linux day in and day out, but I think Ubuntu didn’t come to the forefront until after my ex and I separated. Just to be clear, he was the tech guy, and as long as he was around all I had to know was where the on/off button was. Being on my own was a rude awakening, but I’m slowly making technical inroads. ;)


86 posted on 07/31/2011 12:50:22 PM PDT by Fantasywriter
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To: KyGeezer

I guess the fact that IE is already installed on almost every PC sold has no impact on the validity of the study.


87 posted on 07/31/2011 2:02:22 PM PDT by fini
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To: KyGeezer
Check out Slim, Slick!
88 posted on 07/31/2011 2:14:10 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Let us prey!)
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To: KyGeezer

Bookmark


89 posted on 07/31/2011 4:08:50 PM PDT by ru4liberty
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To: Paradox
I am using Chrome.

Question then:

I was using Chrome (and liked it a lot) but I noticed that I could not get the posts here on Free Republic to default to a 12 clock Eastern Time format.

No matter what I tried, it continued to show posts only in Military Time.

When I DL'd the newest Firefox (5.0) and came back here, all was well. So I decided it must be a problem with Chrome.

Was I wrong?
Do you have a solution?

TIA

90 posted on 07/31/2011 4:19:01 PM PDT by eddie willers
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To: caww

I love my addons. I can add on tons of things to Firefox that make it more useful for me. I have weather showing in the toolbar. I have a picture zoom feature, I can set the font size differently for each website. I have to approve flash movies before they play. I have a feature that makes links “clickable”, so I don’t have to cut and paste. I have installed themes to make my browser prettier. I can click on a picture and block it from showing on my browser again. That one’s very useful around here, especially for the Helen Thomas threads! There are tons of others.


91 posted on 07/31/2011 4:31:28 PM PDT by Politicalmom ("President Fox's vision for an open border is a vision I embrace"- Rick Perry)
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To: eddie willers
When I DL'd the newest Firefox (5.0) and came back here, all was well. So I decided it must be a problem with Chrome.

It is. I just tried it, and it wants to format timestamps like "Sun Jul 31 2011 19:49:48 GMT-0400 (EDT)". It's supposed to honor whatever date/time zone and format you have configured for your machine. It's getting the zone right, but not the format.

FR pages download with all the timestamps formatted in Pacific time, e.g., "07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT". There is a JavaScript loop that rifles through all the timestamps on the page and tries to convert each one to the local zone and format by calling, for example, new Date("07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT").toLocaleString(). Chrome's toLocaleString function is broken.

92 posted on 07/31/2011 5:26:30 PM PDT by cynwoody
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To: cynwoody
There is a JavaScript loop that rifles through all the timestamps on the page and tries to convert each one to the local zone and format by calling, for example, new Date("07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT").toLocaleString(). Chrome's toLocaleString function is broken.

Is that something John R. can fix, or is it endemic to Chrome?

93 posted on 07/31/2011 8:33:19 PM PDT by eddie willers
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To: KyGeezer

Outstanding...I see that nothing has changed for IE9..lol.


94 posted on 07/31/2011 10:04:42 PM PDT by willyd (your credibility deficit is screwing up my bs meter...)
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To: eddie willers
Is that something John R. can fix, or is it endemic to Chrome?

Not easily. He could substitute something else for the zone conversion code, but there isn't any good way for him to discover and implement your particular preferences. That's what toLocaleString is supposed to do, but doesn't.

I've heard that Greasemonkey exists for Chrome, although I haven't used it myself as yet. That means you could conceivably implement your own fix. You would need to write a Greasemonkey script to look for each <span> tag with class 'date', parse the existing innerHTML as a date, reformat the date to your liking, and assign the result back to the tag's innerHTML. That's what John's existing loop does, only he uses toLocaleString, which is broken in Chrome.

The existing code is at the bottom of http://www.freerepublic.com/l/common.js, in the NG_Localize function. Judging from what's commented out, it looks like he used to have a cut-and-dried implementation but decided to replace it with toLocaleString. In browsers where toLocaleString is implemented correctly, that's the way to go: users who want 24-hour time get it; users who don't, don't.

95 posted on 08/01/2011 12:59:48 AM PDT by cynwoody
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