We launched a preview of the WebXPRT 4 results viewer just before the new year, and have published over 75 results from a wide range of devices. We appreciate the results submissions we’ve received from independent testers so far, and will continue to populate the viewer with WebXPRT 4 Preview results from both our own testing and PT-curated external submissions.
If
you’ve run the test and have tried to submit results, you may have encountered
one or both of the following bugs, depending on the device type you’re testing:
You filled out the results submission
form, but the Submit button didn’t seem to do anything.
The test automatically downloaded
the results csv file multiple times.
We’ve identified the causes of the two bugs, and have instituted fixes. The bug fixes do not affect the benchmark’s workloads or scores. If you tested the WebXPRT 4 Preview and were frustrated by the results submission bugs, we apologize for the inconvenience, and invite you to retry submitting your results.
If you have any questions or comments about the WebXPRT 4 Preview or the results viewer, please feel free to contact us!
We’re excited
to announce that the WebXPRT 4 Preview is now available! Testers can access the
Preview at www.WebXPRT4.com or through a link on WebXPRT.com. The Preview is available to everyone, and testers can now
publish scores from Preview build testing. We may still tweak a few things, but
will limit any changes that we make between the Preview and the final release
to the UI and features we do not expect to affect test scores.
Longtime
WebXPRT users will notice that the WebXPRT 4 Preview has a new, but familiar,
UI. The general process for kicking off both manual and automated tests is the
same as with WebXPRT 3, so the transition from WebXPRT 3 to WebXPRT 4 testing
should be straightforward. We encourage everyone to visit the XPRT blog for more details about what’s new in this Preview release.
In addition, keep
your eye on the blog for more details about the all-new WebXPRT
4 results viewer, which we expect to publish in the very near future. We think
WebXPRT testers will enjoy using the viewer to explore our WebXPRT 4 test data!
After you try the WebXPRT 4 Preview, please send us your comments. Thanks and happy testing!
Last week, we provided readers with an overview of what to expect in the WebXPRT 4 Preview, as well as an update on the Preview’s release schedule. Since then, we’ve been working on UI adjustments and bug fixes, additional technical tweaks, and follow-up testing. We’re very close, but won’t be able to meet our original goal of publishing the Preview today. We believe it will be ready for release early next week.
As a reminder, once we release the WebXPRT 4 Preview, testers will be able to publish scores from Preview build testing. We will limit any changes that we make between the Preview and the final release to the UI or to features we do not expect to affect test scores.
If you have any questions about WebXPRT 4 or the Preview build, please let us know!
The holiday season is
fast approaching, and with widespread product shortages and supply chain
interruptions in the tech industry, it’s wise to start your holiday shopping
now. If you’re considering phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops as gifts,
but are unsure where to get reliable information about the devices, the XPRTs can
help!
One of the core
functions of the XPRTs is to cut through the marketing noise by providing
objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance. For example, instead of
trying to guess whether a new Chromebook is fast enough to handle the demands
of remote learning, you can use its CrXPRT and WebXPRT performance scores to see how it stacks up against the
competition on everyday tasks.
A good place to start looking
for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 2,800 test
results from over 110 sources, including major tech review publications around
the world, OEMs, and independent testers. You can find a wealth of current and
historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of
devices. Learn how to use the results browser here.
If you’re considering
a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT
score for that device. You can find these reviews by going to your favorite
tech review site and searching for “XPRT,” or entering the name of the device
and the appropriate XPRT (e.g., “Apple iPad” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine.
Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one or more of the XPRTs to
evaluate popular devices:
The XPRTs can help
consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday
season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an
XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT
scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!
People choose a default web browser based on several factors.
Speed is sometimes the deciding factor, but privacy settings, memory load,
ecosystem integration, and web app capabilities can also come into play.
Regardless of the motivations behind a person’s go-to browser choice, the
dominance of software-as-a-service (SaaS) computing means that new updates are
always right around the corner. In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about how browser speed can increase
or decrease significantly after an update, only to swing back in the other
direction shortly thereafter. OS-specific optimizations can also affect
performance, such as with Microsoft Edge on Windows and Google Chrome on Chrome
OS.
Windows 11 began rolling out earlier this month, and tech press outlets
such as AnandTech and PCWorld have used WebXPRT
3 to evaluate the impact of the new OS—or
specific settings in the OS—on browser performance. Our own in-house tests, which
we discuss below, show a negligible impact on browser performance when updating
our test system from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It’s important to note that depending
on a system’s hardware setup, the impact might be more significant in certain
scenarios. For more information about such scenarios, we encourage you to read the
PCWorld article discussing the impact of the Windows 11 default virtualization-based
security (VBS) settings on
browser performance in some instances.
In our comparison tests, we used a Dell
XPS 13 7930 with an Intel
Core i3-10110U processor and 4 GB of RAM. For the Windows 10 tests, we used a
clean Windows 10 Home image updated to version 20H2 (19042.1165). For the
Windows 11 tests, we updated the system to Windows 11 Home version 21H2 (22000.282).
On each OS version, we ran WebXPRT 3 three times on the latest versions of five
browsers: Brave, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. For
each browser, the score we post below is the median of the three test runs.
In our last
round of tests on Windows 10, Firefox was the clear winner. Three of the
Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, and Opera) produced very close scores,
and the performance of Brave lagged by about 7 percent. In this round of
Windows 10 testing, performance on every browser improved slightly, with Google
Chrome taking a slight lead over Firefox.
In our Windows 11 testing, we were interested to find that without exception, browser scores were slightly lower than in Windows 10 testing. However, none of the decreases were statistically significant. Most users performing daily tasks are unlikely to notice that degree of difference.
Have you observed any significant differences in WebXPRT 3 scores
after upgrading to Windows 11? If so, let us know!
The WebXPRT 4 development process is
far enough along that we’d like to share more about changes we are likely to
make and a rough target date for publishing a preview build. While some of the
details below will probably change, this post should give readers a good sense
of what to expect.
General changes
Some of the non-workload changes in
WebXPRT 4 relate to our typical benchmark update process, and a few result
directly from feedback we received from the WebXPRT tech press survey.
We will update the aesthetics of the WebXPRT UI to make
WebXPRT 4 visually distinct from older versions. We do not anticipate
significantly changing the flow of the UI.
We will update content in some of the workloads to
reflect changes in everyday technology. For instance, we will upgrade most
of the photos in the photo processing workloads to higher resolutions.
In response to a request from tech press survey
respondents, we are considering adding a looping function to the
automation scripts.
We are investigating the possibility of shortening the
benchmark by reducing the default number of iterations from seven to five.
We will only make this change if we can ensure that five iterations produce
consistently low score variance.
Changes to existing workloads
Photo
Enhancement. This workload applies three effects
to two photos each (six photos total). It tests HTML5 Canvas, Canvas 2D, and
JavaScript performance. The only change we are considering is adding
higher-resolution photos.
Organize Album Using AI. This workload currently uses the ConvNetJS neural network library to complete two tasks: (1) organizing five images and (2) classifying the five images in an album. We are planning to replace ConvNetJS with WebAssembly (WASM) for both tasks and are considering upgrading the images to higher resolutions.
Stock Option Pricing. This workload calculates and displays graphic views of a stock portfolio using Canvas, SVG, and dygraph.js. The only change we are considering is combining it with the Sales Graphs workload (below).
Sales Graphs. This workload provides a web-based application displaying multiple views of sales data. Sales Graphs exercises HTML5 Canvas and SVG performance. The only change we are considering is combining it with the Stock Option Pricing workload (above).
Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan. This workload uses ASM.js to sync notes, extract text from a scanned receipt using optical character recognition (OCR), and add the scanned text to a spending report. We are planning to replace ASM.js with WASM for the Notes task and with WASM-based Tesseract for the OCR task.
Online Homework. This workload uses regex, arrays, strings, and Web Workers to review DNA and spell-check an essay. We are not planning to change this workload.
Possible new workloads
Natural Language Processing (NLP). We are considering the addition of an NLP workload using ONNX Runtime and/or TensorFlowJS. The workload would use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to answer questions about a given text. Similar use cases are becoming more prevalent in conversational bot systems, domain-specific document search tools, and various other educational applications.
Message Scrolling. We are considering developing a new workload that would use an Angular or React.js to scroll through hundreds of messages. We’ll share more about this possible workload as we firm up the details.
The release timeline
We hope to publish a WebXPRT 4
preview build in the second half of November, with a general release before the
end of the year. If it looks as though that timeline will change significantly,
we’ll provide an update here in the blog as soon as possible.
We’re very grateful for all the
input we received during the WebXPRT 4 planning process. If you have any
questions about the details we’ve shared above, please feel free to ask!
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