So Now Your Browser Choice is an IQ Test: UPDATED!

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UPDATE! This story seems to have been a hoax. Mashable figured it out first. They report,

CBR found that AptiQuant’s — the supposed company behind the survey — website contains large chunks of text and images identical to the material found on the site of a psychometric testing company called Central Test. Compare these two pages, for example, and you’ll see that at least one of these companies is fake.

However, CBR has gotten a statement from Central Test claiming they don’t have any connection to AptiQuant, which pretty much cements the entire story as a hoax.

The BBC News also confirmed that the story was bogus.

Sorry we fell for it along with everyone else.

. . .

The headline on Mashable was IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY]. According to Mashable, it was actually a pretty big study: 101,326 people divided into groups according to which browser they use. That was correlated with the average IQ of the users.

It turns out that all those Internet Explorer for Dummies books weren't just part of the Dummies series. Yep. All the extra smart people are using Opera. And the longer you stick with IE, the comparatively dumber you get. Or, as the study concludes, “individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”

Here's a chart of the data collected in the study.

The press release from Canadian company AptiQuant who did the study suggests,

Internet Explorer has traditionally been considered a pain in the back for web developers. 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. But with the results of this study, IT companies worldwide will start to take a new look on the time and money they spend on supporting older browsers.

The study, titled “Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage” is available as a downloadable PDF document.

Now for the fun. Reactions!

A lot of people were quick to step up and say they'd been using Opera (or Chrome) for a long time. I'm going to ignore them. Let's get some other reactions.