Internet Explorer users are probably less intelligent than others

As web developers, this news makes us giddy, because developing for older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer is always a time-wasting, frustrating challenge. A group called AptiQuant released a study showing that users of Internet Explorer (the default browser in most Windows installations) actually scored slightly lower, on average, in an online IQ test compared to users of Chrome or Firefox. Users of more obscure browsers such as Camino and Opera scored the highest, on average, in the IQ test.

Internet Explorer was, until recently, exceptionally non-compliant with modern web coding standards. When a web application developer such as us had to create applications for clients, we often had to take extraordinary and special measures to make sure the sites we created would even work properly in Internet Explorer. More recent versions (the latest is Internet Explorer 9) are more compliant with web standards, but the adoption of the latest versions has been slow as people have migrated away to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome as well as Safari on Mac computers.

Any web developer will tell you horror stories about coding for IE6. While we’re happy that those days are over, this news still confirms some basic suspicions we’ve had about users of Internet Explorer…

It all makes sense now.

Anyways, if you want to be a Smart Kid™ too, change your browser. You can download Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera and join the club. Let us know how many IQ points you gain.