Science & Tech

What your choice of internet browser at work says about you

Picture: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images
Picture: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

You may not think choosing a browser reveals a lot about you, but it does - and not just to the companies prying into your search history and personal data.

Adam Grant is an author and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

He recently published a book, called Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, which attempts to identify the type of free-thinkers who champion ideas which move industries forward.

Within it, he tried to identify tropes about these types of workers and while attempting to look at commitment to workers' jobs, he looked at their job history.

He found that employees' job histories had little bearing on their likelihood to move - but he did find some correlation between types of browsers used at work and job performance.

Grant looked at research by Michael Housman, a business analyst and statistician, which looked at 30,000 customer service agents, finding the following browsers were endemic of the following characteristics:

Explorer and Safari

  • Less commitment in the workplace

Firefox and Chrome

  • More likely to remain in their job, 15 per cent longer than Safari or Explorer users
  • 19 per cent less likely to miss work than Safari or Explorer users
  • Higher sales
  • Shorter call times
  • Higher customer satisfaction levels

Grant told Freakonomics Radio:

I think that the fact that you took the time to install Firefox on your computer shows us something about you. It shows that you’re someone who is an informed consumer.

You’ve made an active choice to do something that wasn’t default.

Grant also recently gave a TED talk on his theories, which you can watch in full, below:

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HT MailOnline

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