A study, and a fairly quantitative one, is suggesting that the dinner conversation talk I think some of us may have had about the average Internet Explorer user may be true. AptiQuant offered free online IQ tests to over 100 000 people and then plotted the average IQ scores based on the browser on which the test was taken.

AptiQuant, the Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company that conducted the tests, effectively set out to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser a user was using.

According to their report, Internet Explorer users scored lower than average on the IQ tests than that for people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Supposedly those that used Camino, Opera and Internet Explorer with the Chrome Frame had remarkably higher IQ levels than all the others.

Of course the IQ test has long since been debated as to whether or not it constitutes a valid measurement of cognitive ability and this study, like the dinner conversation, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The report did however raise another fundamental problem that Internet Explorer can cause and that is the fact that it can cause web developers endless problems.

Microsoft was able to hold onto a rather large portion of the web browser market simply because of the integration with one of the world’s most popular operating system platforms – Windows – and this needs to be taken into account too when looking at these results.

Any IT company involved in web development will acknowledge the fact that millions of man hours are wasted each year to make otherwise perfectly functional websites work in Internet Explorer, because of its lack of compatibility with web standards.

The continuous use of older versions of IE by millions of people around the world has often haunted web developers.

This trend not only makes their job tougher, but has also pulled back innovation by at least a decade.

That is changing though and internet users globally are slowly realising that the product offered by open source providers is often better suited to their internet needs.

[Source: AptiQuant]