We are all well aware that IE has been the butt of many jokes over the years, justly or unjustly depending on who you ask. A new report from consulting firm AptiQuant may have just provided ammunition for a whole new round of jokes.

Apparently, IE users aren’t quite the smartest citizens of the interwebs – at least when compared to users of Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Here’s how the test went: AptiQuant offered online IQ tests to over 100,000 people and charted the results based on which browser they used to take the test. Simple as that.

The results show that IE users of all versions performed the poorest of all browsers tested. And the older the version of IE you’re using, the lower your IQ. IE 6 users and IE 7 users average a score of barely over 80. IE 9 and IE 8 users averaged around 95 and 90, respectively.

Next were Firefox users, followed by Chrome and then Safari. The real bright bulbs turned out to be Opera users, who average an IQ score of just under 130.

They also measured these results against results from 2006 and found that IE users have dropped on the scale over the past 5 years.

AptiQuant concluded this –

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

Of course not all people who use IE lack intelligence. But these findings have to make you wonder; why do those other browsers appeal to a more intelligent crowd?