The Smartest Browser and OS

The IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, they correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their server logs. Along with the geographical distinctions like city and country, the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT. Quick! Test out and move the bars on the pretty graph! Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's currently number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

Great.

[One Childish N00b]

Is there any way this is not going to turn into a flamewar and/or an excuse to bash IE?
Come on, guys, we know it sucks. Let's have some news already.

Re:IQ Test?

[Coopjust]

Yeah, some of the questions I received were about the Beatles and Russian History. Those seem like historical knowledge tests, not intelligence quotient...

Re:IQ Test?

[gujo-odori]

Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.

Dropping Score

[blavallee]

/. has dropped to number 11

Guess no one took into account the large sector of (insert field) managers that read slashdot.

Re:IQ Test?

[andy753421]

From Wikipedia on the inventor of IQ tests: "His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum."

Since school curriculums tend to involve things such as Literature, History, and Science it makes complete sense that knowing a lot about earth history and the the most popular book in the world would increase your IQ.

Re:IQ Test?

[TubeSteak]

Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.

Then you're a lot dumber than you think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale#14_subtests_of_the_WAIS-III [wikipedia.org]

Verbal subtests
Information
Degree of general information acquired from culture (e.g. Who is the president of Russia?)

Comprehension
Ability to deal with abstract social conventions, rules and expressions (e.g. What does "Kill 2 birds with 1 stone" metaphorically mean?)

Apparently people smarter than you are have decided that "who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned" are very relevant to your IQ.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) wasn't an H-bomb.

This IQ test is really, really real...

[coinmac]

Copyright (C) 2008 IQLeague. Our IQ tests are for entertainment purposes only.

Always read the fine print, assuming the bad grammar didn't tip you off first...

Re:"Curretly"?

[witherstaff]

This is a joke of a test. It has some of the basic concepts down - visualization, pattern matching, logic puzzles - but the layout and the other sort of questions is not apt. I was asked about the Chunnel - sure I knew it, but local geography should not be applicable.

If anyone wants a real IQ test, take some of the mensa fun tests. [mensa.org] That will show what a real test is like.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[flink]

CMD+Option + on the mac gives that to you on the system level and virtual resolutions does the same under X windows. I guess it's useful under MS Windows though. I've found that Firefox will usually respond to Ctrl++ if you hit it enough times though, so I've never really found myself missing zoom on WinNT.

Re:IQ Test?

[Facetious]

Nor was the one dropped on Nagasaki (Fat Man). In fact, an H-bomb has never been used in war. (For the pedantic, "used" doesn't mean proliferation during the cold war. It means intentionally killing people.)

Re:IQ Test?

[exitmoose]

I.Q. has a very precise meaning and is not the same as the vernacular term "intelligence". It's instructive to note that neither the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale - III nor the Stanford-Binet IQ test (the one used by Mensa) use general knowledge questions in their test, as I.Q. is supposed to be a test of mental acuity, not a test of "smartness". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale [wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford-Binet [wikipedia.org]

Re:Lower is better!

[RpiMatty]

You don't have 60 seconds total.
If you answer in less than 5 seconds, you get 1 point.
If you answer in more than 45 seconds, you get 0.5 points.
If you answer somewhere in between, you get somewhere in between 0.5 and 1 point.

If your score is equal to the median, your IQ is 100.
For each standard deviation away from the median, your IQ changes by 15 pts.

From http://www.iqleague.com/iq-scores [iqleague.com]

it's more of a "what's your time worth" test

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I took the test and my score dropped significantly after answering additional questions. Did I get lucky or did the questions get harder? Difficult to say. I believe they got a hell of a lot harder after that first run. Also consider that my "penalty" was reduced after additional questions, lending credence to the theory that the questions get harder. My score went from 116 in the first run to 105 by the third set.

If that is indeed the case, all this says is that the supposedly "smart" people using Firefox on XP are just lazier and not answering as many questions. This seems to fit the stereotype of the more twitchy ADD Firefox/XP crowd, versus the the older, lazier folks running IE and WinNT with nothing but time on their hands.

Of course, the fact that I answered the additional questions takes away from the theory, but I can say that I really almost didn't, I was feeling lazier than usual today. :D

List updated

[velen]

After being Slashdotted, the statistics for this site as below.

1. Opera on UNIX 103.40
2. Firefox on MacPPC 103.35
3. AppleMAC-Safari on MacPPC 103.27
4. Mozilla on UNIX 103.13
5. Mozilla on MacPPC 103.05
6. AppleMAC-Safari on Unknown 102.77
7. Firefox on UNIX 102.75
8. Firefox on Unknown 102.53
9. Mozilla on Unknown 102.21
10. Firefox on Win2000 101.93
11. Firefox on Win98 101.48
12. Opera on MacPPC 101.26
13. Firefox on WinXP 101.14
14. Mozilla on WinXP 101.09
15. Firefox on WinNT 100.99
16. Opera on WinXP 100.17
17. Opera on Win2000 99.97
18. Opera on WinNT 98.99
19. IE on WinNT 98.09
20. Mozilla on Win2000 98.09

my IQ is falling

[burdalane]

After the first 10 questions, my IQ was 20 points lower than my score from other IQ tests. A half hour later I answered another 10 questions, and my IQ dropped by 10 points.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Back in the day atleast firefox zoom changed the page layout and didn't worked for embedded content. Operas webpages still looked like the original, only bigger, same zoom everywhere.

Re:Lower is better!

[fbjon]

A completely language-independent test that gives the score based on statistics of how previous people did [iqout.com]. The "questions" get more difficult the more you answer correctly, and when I say difficult, I mean really fscking difficult. Don't worry if you have no idea what the answer is, you'll get an easier one if you wait for the 45 seconds per question to expire.

Note that, as should be, the test only measures a specific kind of intelligence. No language or numerical stuff.