Friday, February 10, 2006
External Validity
I am a big Firefox booster. I pretty much refuse to use IE if there is any way to avoid it. You should too. Go download Firefox now. Your life will be better. It will also probably be less vulnerable to internet security flaws, but how much so is still unclear.
This study does absolutely nothing to help clear things up. Testing an unpatched version of IE versus any version of Firefox, which is almost by definition patched, is completely useless. Anyone who is using such a 'virgin' IE release probably isn't net-savvy enough to download Firefox, or even type in the correct URL. So the comparison is utterly invalid. This study would not have been more difficult to perform in a meaningful fashion: not to have done so reveals either extreme bias without the cleverness to even vaguely mask it, a failure to grasp experimental design principles in the first place.
This study does absolutely nothing to help clear things up. Testing an unpatched version of IE versus any version of Firefox, which is almost by definition patched, is completely useless. Anyone who is using such a 'virgin' IE release probably isn't net-savvy enough to download Firefox, or even type in the correct URL. So the comparison is utterly invalid. This study would not have been more difficult to perform in a meaningful fashion: not to have done so reveals either extreme bias without the cleverness to even vaguely mask it, a failure to grasp experimental design principles in the first place.
