As you may have heard, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight this week. As we were testing it, we noticed that our WebXPRT scores were about 8 percent lower than those reported by AnandTech.
The folks at AnandTech do a good job on their reviews, so we wanted to understand the discrepancy in scores. The S7 comes in a couple of models, so we started by verifying that our model was the same as theirs. It was.
The next step was to check their configuration against ours, and this is where we found the difference. Both phones were running the same version of Android, but the S7 AnandTech tested used Chrome 48 while the S7 we tested came preloaded with Chrome 49. In our testing, we’ve noticed that upgrading from Chrome 48 to Chrome 49 has a noticeable performance impact on certain devices. On the Samsung Galaxy S6, the scores went down about 10 percent. In all cases we’ve seen, the decrease is driven largely by the Stock Option Pricing workload.
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about browser versions affecting results. WebXPRT is a browsing benchmark, and the browser has a legitimate impact on performance. When you’re comparing results, it’s always important to look at all the factors involved.
Justin
Last week in the XPRTs
We published the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight on the Samsung Galaxy S7.
We added two new BatteryXPRT ’14 results.
We added one new MobileXPRT ’15 result.
We added four new WebXPRT ’15 results.
