According to a study conducted by New Relic which measures browser speeds on both mobile and desktop platforms, Internet Explorer 9 takes the cake for the fastest browsing experience on Windows with load times of around 3 seconds, while Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 17 tied at 3.5. Safari for Windows 5.1 took 4 seconds to load the same page.

On the Mac side, Chrome is the winner with Chrome 13 reporting load times of 2.4. Chrome 19 on the other time has load times of around 2.7, tying it with Safari 5.1. In the survey, a total of 7 Chrome versions were tested. Firefox 11 for Mac took 2.8 seconds.

The mobile browser speed results are quite interesting. Apparently, Blackberries are in fact good for one thing; BlackBerry Opera Mini 6.5 took around 2.6 seconds to load pages, compared to Safari (iPad) 5.1′s load time of 5 seconds, and Safari (iPhone) 5.0′s load time of 6.2 seconds. The load time for Safari (iPhone) 5.1 was around 6.6 seconds. Opera Mobile 12 for Android’s load time was around 7.3 seconds.

The study was conducted in March 2012 over the course of one week, in which New Relic surveyed and measured the speed of 5 billion global page loads across PC and mobile browsers.

In conclusion, here’s a statistical tidbit: This year’s average page load is 5.5 seconds, compared to last year’s time of 6 seconds.

Ever since its launch, Google Chrome has been gaining market share at a steady rate. Now, StatsCounter is reporting that Google Chrome has finally managed to surpass Firefox globally. Chrome’s worldwide market share rose to 25.69%, while Firefox slipped to 25.23%. Microsoft Internet Explorer also continued its slide and fell to 40.63% at the end of November.

Google Chrome gained 21% over the past two years, while Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera lost 15.94%, 6.98, and 0.2% each. Safari also managed to gain 2.255 market share since November 2009. In India the figure are slightly different as Indian users have typically been more reactive to market changes than Americans. Only 26.9% Indians surf using Internet Explorer, while 34.29% and 34.75% rely on Firefox and Chrome respectively. Opera controls a shade above 2.5% of the market share in India.

Browser statistics tend to be wildly inaccurate and inconsistent. However, they are still good enough to gauge the market trend, and in this case the trend is clear. Google Chrome’s rise in popularity has been nothing short of spectacular. Introduced in late 2008, it has won the hearts of millions of web users with its focus on speed, security, and simplicity. Although Chrome is undoubtedly benefiting from Google’s deep pocket and wide reach, the Chrome team needs to be applauded for getting their priorities right. Within a short span of time Chrome has made its presence felt with its innovative drive and commitment to web standards.

Firefox on the other hand struggled to ship the ambitious Firefox 4 update, lost out in the browser speed wars, and seems to perennially lag behind Chrome. Many fans believe that Mozilla’s lack of vision is hurting Firefox, which was once the darling of the alternate browser crowd.

Aptiquant, a Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company, which specializes in helping organizations objectively assess applicants and employees, has released the results of its study in which it correlated the IQ (Intelligent Quotients) of users with the browser they were using. The results aren’t all that surprising.

On an average, Internet Explorer users were found to have the least IQ, while Opera users had the highest. Camino users and Internet Explorer users with Chrome Frame plugin were also found to have higher than average IQ. The results are pretty much what you would expect. The dominance of Internet Explorer has long been attributed to its bundling with Windows. A sizeable portion of users tend to just use what Windows ships with instead of looking for alternatives. Heck, many people don’t even know what is a web browser. On the other hand Opera, which has remained the niche browser, is often dubbed as the browser for geeks and power users.

In order to collect the data Aptiquant relied on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (IV) test, which is available on its website. The gender, geographic location, and browser of netizens taking the test were recorded along with their test results. The scores of more than 101,326 individuals were analyzed.

Aptiquant also compared their recent dataset with the data they had collected in 2006. The older dataset paints a significantly different picture. The mean IQ of Opera users drops significantly, and Internet Explorer (6 and 7) gets a significant boost. Clearly, over the last five years, Internet Explorer has lost its share of intelligent users, as power users have migrated elsewhere.

Aptiquant also divided the users into IQ groups based on their percentile ranks. Once again, Internet Explorer users dominated the lower percentile groups, while Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari users dominated the higher percentile groups.

Aptiquant’s study reinforces that stereotype that Internet Explorer is a dumb user’s browser. It also demonstrates that Microsoft has simply not been able to stay abreast with its competitors. Even though Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users have a higher IQ score than Internet Explorer 6 users, Microsoft has failed to stop the flow of power users to third-party alternatives. Internet Explorer still has a healthy market share. However, masses often follow the early adopters and power users. Microsoft will need to come up with something pretty brilliant if it hopes to reverse Internet Explorer’s fortunes.

Hat tip: @Opera

Google is on a roll. Just yesterday they launched a new social networking service called Google+ along with several new changes to Google search homepage, search results. They also ended up adding author thumbnails to them and launching an option to export your Google data. A few days earlier Google had also launched the +1 button for websites which allowed users to up-vote your content.

(click to enlarge)

When the +1 button had launched, Google did not provide statistics to the users. However, they have now rolled out a new feature to Webmaster Tools where you can see your +1 button activity and it’s impact on search results.

The +1 button metrics will be available as an option in your webmaster tools profile for the website and it will contain of three things which will include a "Search impact" report, +1 button Activity report and an Audience report to show you how many people have clicking on the +1 buttons.

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1′d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1′d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1′d pages from your site

The addition of statistics for the +1 button will definitely encourage more users to adapt the button on the website. After all those +1′s are going to get you additional traffic from Google.

Tumblr, the popular micro-blogging service just announced that it has crossed 250 million page-views per day. This is definitely big for the micro-blogging service which has seen several ups and downs in the past, including a fight with Anonymous and a very long downtime they suffered due to a database crash.

Tumblr’s growth has been phenomenal and they have managed to do more page-views than Posterous and more recently WordPress, though that might have changed now. However, the service is far from perfect and users are frequently greeted with a message saying that “Tumblr is down for some reason or the other” every now and then.

Tumblr though has managed to overcome several of their infrastructure problems to consistently grow over the last few months. For example, they grew from around 20 million views a day to 250 million views in less than a year. That is almost a 500% growth. Additionally, they have grown more than twice since October 2010.

Tumblr will definitely be happy about these stats, but I hope that they are taking very good care of their infrastructure too as it is really annoying to see that the site is not working when I visit them.

I have used almost each and every variant of Microsoft Windows including MS DOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98. However, two of the standout operating systems from Microsoft have been Windows XP and Windows 7. Windows Vista was an ok OS too, but it did have a lot of problems.

Windows XP was launched in August 2001, however, it still commands a huge market share in the PC market. Windows 7 though has been the fastest selling OS in history with it selling over 150 million copies in a very short time.

Ironically, Windows 7 did not compete with Windows Vista for market share, but did it with a 10 year old OS in the form of Windows XP. The reason being that many corporates are not yet ready to switch from Windows XP. I still find that many offices continue to use Windows XP as their primary operating system.

Microsoft though will be happy with the news that Windows 7 has finally managed to take over Windows XP as the top Windows operating system in United States. This data was generated through reports from StatCounter by Royal Pingdom for visitors to over 3 million websites.

Windows 7 now has a marginal advantage over Windows XP in U.S. This is bound to grow in future with more users buying new laptops and desktop PCs and dumping their older ones. Also, most of the newer Windows based tablets run some variants of Windows 7, so that might add to this number in future.

Overall, Windows XP has definitely been one of the best operating system from Microsoft. The fact that it still holds more than 31% of the market share after 10 years says a lot about it.

Microsoft has been mulling to remove support for Windows XP for a long time now, but they still continue to support it. However, Microsoft has been culling off major software support for the OS by not adding XP support for Windows Live Wave 4  and Internet Explorer 9. However, Windows XP still continues to dominate the operating system wars. Unlike IE6, this baby is a long way from becoming extinct.

If you are using Windows 7 or just bought a new PC with it installed, make sure to read out Ultimate List of Tips and Tricks for Windows 7 or the 3 Most Useful Windows 7 Tips.

At this point of time I have 4 mobile phones on me, my colleague has two and my boss has about 5 (he changes them regularly). Now that is not an amazing stat in itself, however, as you can see we have a huge mobile penetration amongst ourselves.

Now, did you know that in African regions there is only one phone used by around 2.4 users or 4 phones for every 10 persons. In Europe the penetration is 0.8 people per mobile or 13 phones every 10 people. In Italy almost all users have 2 phones whereas in US there is 1 mobile for every 1.1 person.

These stats come from the latest data made available from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) which breaks down and tracks the number of people for every SIM card subscription across different continents.

The folks at Nokia Conversations created an infographic that shows mobile phone distributions across several continents from this data. You can see the infographic below.

So how many phones do you own? Do let me know through your comments.

Firefox 4 was released on March 22, 2011 and it created a record of sorts by being downloaded more than a million times in a few hours. Over 7 million copies of Firefox 4 were downloaded in the first 24 hours. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 was downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours.

Mozilla has now released a new infographic which shows the amount of downloads that happened in the first 48 hours of launch and compares it with several different things including a trip to the moon.

For example, Firefox 4 was downloaded 15.85 million times in the first 48 hours. If each download were a mile, it would have been 33 round trips to the moon and back. It is also larger than the population of LOS Angeles which is the 12th largest city in the world.

There were 10,200 downloads made per minute at peak and 5,503 average downloads per minute. This mean that Firefox 4 was downloaded 91.7 times per second. This is definitely some cool stats. For the rest check the infographic embedded below.

Currently the Firefox 4 download count stands at over 25.6 million. You can view live stats for FF4 downloads at http://glow.mozilla.org/.

Update: Please note that the IE9 download numbers are only for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows Server based PCs, whereas Firefox 4 numbers are for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

India is one of leading countries in the world which has seen a large growth in Internet usage. It also incidentally has the world’s largest number of mobile users, currently around 600 million.

So how much has India grown? Well, from a meager 25,000 users in 1998 it has grown to 100 million users. Though it is hardly 10% of the Indian population it still puts India at number 3 in world Internet users after China and the United States.

Internet was first started out in 1995 and has radically grown through the years. Most of the Indians go online to check emails, visit social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, download music, instant messaging, watching online videos and more. However, India does lag behind in one area; internet speed. They are currently ranked at number 144 with an average speed of 1.42 Mbps speed.

Interesting facts right? Check out the entire infographic of growth of Internet users in India through 2010 below (click to enlarge).

(h/t @manan – via Flickr)

For those in the unknown, Burj Khalifa is the the tallest structure every created in the world. It’s height according to recorded stats is 828 meters or 2,717 ft. The next highest man-made tower is the Taipei 101 which stands at 1,671 feet. So can anyone beat the Burj Khalifa as the tallest structure in the world?

Yes, but that is if you stack hard drives which account for 10 Petabytes of data. As you can see from the above illustration, which was created by the folks at Backblaze; who provide online backups/cloud storage to customer; after they reached 10 petabytes of backup data. They also stated that the amount of backup data they have is bigger than the internet archive.

So we finally have something to rival the man-made structure with man-made data. What do you think? Can you imagine that someone would create a tower bigger than 10 petabytes now?

Also it would be great to know how much data storage you have online and offline. Make sure to tell me about it through your comments.

(h/t @arpitnext)