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Does your Web browser say something about your intelligence?
by Jonathan Strickland | August 3, 2011
A couple of days ago, a story made the rounds that a company called AptiQuant had conducted a study that found a correlation between intelligence of Web surfers and their browser of choice. Respectable news sources like The Telegraph reported on the findings. According to the report, people who rely on Internet Explorer possess below-average intelligence. Those who use Chrome and Firefox are slightly more intelligent than average. The real eggheads use Camino, Opera or Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame. Numerous jokes, insults and flame wars soon followed the report. But there’s just one problem — the whole thing might be a sham.
To follow up on yesterday’s Firefox post… Firefox Downloads in real time – Plus a Firefox 4 preview …almost exactly 10 million copies of Firefox 4 were downloaded between 8AM yesterday and 8AM today. The average right now is about 9,000 downloads per minute. More info on Firefox 4 – particularly interesting are the Panorama [...]
Yesterday we talked about the amazing number of downloads for Rebecca Black’s song. Is there anything more popular than that? The answer would be yes – Firefox version 4 downloads are happening at an amazing rate and this visualization tool lets you see it happening in real time: Firefox 4 Download Stats At the moment [...]
As I look at my task bar, I notice that I have 120 Firefox Windows open. I use Firefox a lot, in other words, and to date Firefox has not really had any features to help people like me. Now there is a new feature called Tab Candy coming down the pipe. It should make things a lot better in the near future for people who do a lot of browsing…
Are you looking at stuff on the web that you don’t want other people to know about? Modern browsers give you a way to protect yourself from embarrassment or discovery. For example, Google’s Chrome browser offers “incognito mode” as described here…
I thought I felt a disturbance in the Force this morning. The source: Google. The search giant dropped an enormous bomb on me today: Sidewiki.
Sidewiki is a browser tool — it plugs in to Firefox or Internet Explorer (no Google Chrome support for a Google tool? How odd!). It allows you to write and read annotations to any Web site. Let me say that again: you can add content (or read content added by other people) to any site on the Web using this tool.
The additional information appears in a sidebar to the left of the body of the Web site (the tool shifts the rest of the site over to the right in a squished view). The data can include thoughts, comments and even active links to other Web sites. More on that later.
The only way you can read added material is to download the tool and activate it yourself while viewing a Web page. User-generated content won’t just pop up on the site on its own. But this tool could conceivably make a huge impact on the Web.
Yep. There’s a hole. Big hole. If you’re using Firefox 3.5, there’s a zero-day exploit in it that will let someone execute a so-called “drive-by” attack on your computer under certain circumstances, according to Tom Espiner at CNET. That means that if you visit a Web site that has malicious code written into it, a hacker may be able to use that exploit to gain access to your computer.
Mozilla said that the flaw lies within the JavaScript just-in-time (JIT) compiler. There’s currently no patch available for the exploit, though Mozilla’s working on one. So what does this mean for you? It means that if you’re running Firefox 3.5, you need to be extra careful where you go at least until Mozilla gets this vulnerability patched. Otherwise, your computer might just pick up something nasty.
You can, if you want, disable the JIT compiler, but Mozilla wants you to know that that’ll decrease the performance of JavaScript.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the boards of directors at Google and Apple are violating antitrust laws. As it stands, the two companies share two directors. One of them is Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of biotech firm Genentech. The other is Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s CEO. According to an article by Miguel Helft and Brad Stone in The New York Times this morning, Google and Apple may be violating section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. The law prohibits boards from sharing directors if it interferes with the companies competing with one another.
But how do they compete? With the iPhone and smart phones powered by Google’s Android operating system, there’s an increasing amount of competition between the two. And then there’s the Web browser market, in which Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are nibbling at the heels of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
Las Vegas is hosting yet another tech conference this week. This time it’s MIX09, a Web development conference hosted by Microsoft at the Venetian Hotel. Between thrasing fake guitar riffs in the Rock Band elimination tournament and snacking on free food, developers will get to attend workshops and listen to keynote speeches delivered by Microsoft bigwigs. This morning, Dean Hachamovitch will be one of those keynote speakers. Hachamovitch leads the team responsible for the design, development and release of Internet Explorer 8.
IE8 has been out in the wild for a while now. First you could download it as a beta build and later as a release candidate. But this morning everyone expects Hachamovitch to announce that the final build for IE8 will debut online today. It’s free to download, so expect Microsoft’s servers to get crazy amounts of traffic later on.
In a recent test performed by CNET UK, Internet Explorer 8 proved to be about 6.7 times faster than its predecessor, IE 7.
There’s no doubt about it, Google loves the beta phase of product development. For the uninitiated, a product is in beta when the provider offers users the chance to test it before its finalized. It may have stability issues among other problems. Google tends to slap the beta label on its products and leave it there. Just look at Gmail, a product Google announced back in 2004 that still carries the beta label.
But Google’s browser, Google Chrome, was different. Google released the beta version in September 2008. They announced the browser by releasing a comic (which even featured a panel with HowStuffWorks.com). In December, Google removed the beta label and proclaimed that the company had achieved its goals with the browser. For those of us used to Google keeping products in beta perpetually, it was a strange and frightening world.
Well guess what? There’s a new version of Google Chrome out now.
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