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More than two million XPRT benchmark runs and downloads!

As we near the end of 2024, we’re excited to share that the XPRTs have passed another notable milestone—over 2,000,000 combined runs and downloads! The rate of growth in the total number of XPRT runs and downloads is exciting. It took about seven and a half years for the XPRTs to pass one million total runs and downloads—but it’s taken less than half that, three and a half years, to add another million. Figure 1 shows the climb to the two-million-run mark.

Figure 1: The cumulative number of total yearly XPRT runs and downloads over time.

As you would expect, most of the runs contributing to that total come from WebXPRT tests. If you’ve run WebXPRT in any of the 983 cities and 84 countries from which we’ve received completed test data—including newcomers El Salvador, Malaysia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia—we’re grateful for your help in reaching this milestone! As Figure 2 illustrates, WebXPRT use has grown steadily since the debut of WebXPRT 2013. On average, we now record more than twice as many WebXPRT runs each month than we recorded in WebXPRT’s entire first year. With over 340,000 runs so far in 2024—an increase of more than 16 percent over last year’s total—that growth is showing no signs of slowing down.

Figure 2: The cumulative number of total yearly WebXPRT runs over time.

This milestone isn’t just about numbers. Establishing and maintaining a presence in the industry and experiencing year-over-year growth requires more than technical know-how and marketing efforts. It requires the ongoing trust and support of the benchmarking community—including OEM labs, the tech press, and independent computer enthusiasts—and those who simply want to know how good their devices are at web browsing.

Once again, we’re thankful for the support of everyone who’s used the XPRTs over the years, and we look forward to another million!

If you have any questions or comments about any of the XPRTs, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

An update on the issue with WebXPRT 4 in iOS 17

Recently, we informed XPRT blog readers that after updating Apple iPhones and iPads to iOS and iPadOS 17, respectively, we began to see WebXPRT 4 failures on those devices. In the Safari and Google Chrome browsers, WebXPRT 4 test runs were freezing while running the Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan workload. We were able to replicate the issue on every iOS/iPadOS 17 device we tested, and we also confirmed that WebXPRT 4 continues to run without issues on other non-iOS platforms.

Our team has been investigating the situation, and we’ve made some progress. It’s clear that the failed test runs are getting stuck when the WASM-based Tesseract.js Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine attempts to scan a shopping receipt. During our research, we’ve discovered an issue when the current Tesseract.js engine runs on iOS 17. This issue is broader than WebXPRT 4, and the Tesseract team is aware of the problem. Future versions of iOS 17 or later versions of Tesseract.js may include fixes for the problem, but unfortunately, we don’t know whether or when a fix will be available.

We’re currently investigating possible workarounds for the problem, and hope to be able to start testing soon. Our goal is that any solution we implement will not significantly affect existing WebXPRT 4 scores on non-iOS 17 platforms.

We will continue to share any substantive progress updates with readers here in the blog. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience this issue causes for WebXPRT 4 users, and we appreciate your patience while we work toward a solution. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

The role of potential WebXPRT 4 auxiliary workloads

As we mentioned in our most recent blog post, we’re seeking suggestions for ways to improve WebXPRT 4. We’re open to the prospect of adding both non-workload features and new auxiliary tests, e.g., a battery life or WebGPU-based graphics test scenario.

To prevent any confusion among WebXPRT 4 testers, we want to reiterate that any auxiliary workloads we might add will not affect existing WebXPRT 4 subtest or overall scores in any way. Auxiliary tests would be experimental or targeted workloads that run separately from the main test and produce their own scores. Current and future WebXPRT 4 results will be comparable to one another, so users who’ve already built a database of WebXPRT 4 scores will not have to retest their devices. Any new tests will be add-ons that allow us to continue expanding the rapidly growing body of published WebXPRT 4 test results while making the benchmark even more valuable to users overall.

If you have any thoughts about potential browser performance workloads, or any specific web technologies that you’d like to test, please let us know.

Justin

How to use the WebXPRT language options

In September, the Chinese tech review site KoolCenter published a review of the ASUS Mini PC PN51 that included a screenshot of the device’s WebXPRT 4 test result screen. The screenshot showed that the testers had enabled the WebXPRT Simplified Chinese UI. Users can choose from three language options in the WebXPRT 4 UI: Simplified Chinese, German, and English. We included Simplified Chinese and German because of the large number of test runs we see from China and Central Europe. We wanted to make testing a little easier for users who prefer those languages, and are glad to see people using the feature.

Changing languages in the UI is very straightforward. Locate the Change Language? prompt under the WebXPRT 4 logo at the top of the Start screen, and click or tap the arrow beside it. After the drop-down menu appears, select the language you want. The language of the start screen changes to the language you selected, and the in-test workload headers and the results screen also appear in your chosen language.

The screenshots below my sig show the Change Language? drop-down menu, and how the Start screen appears when you select Simplified Chinese or German. Be aware that if you have a translation extension installed in your browser, the extension may override the WebXPRT UI by reverting the language back to the default of English. You can avoid this conflict by temporarily disabling the translation extension for the duration of WebXPRT testing.

If you have any questions about WebXPRT’s language options, please let us know!

Justin

Our results database, your resource

Testers who have started using the XPRT benchmarks recently may not know about one of the free resources we offer. The XPRT results database currently holds more than 2,400 test results from over 90 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices.

We update the results database several times a week, adding selected results from our own internal lab testing, end-of-test user submissions, and reliable tech media sources. (After you run one of the XPRTs, you can choose to submit the results, but they don’t automatically appear in the database.)

Before adding a result, we evaluate whether the score makes sense and is consistent with general expectations, which we can do only when we have sufficient system information details. For that reason, we encourage testers to disclose as much hardware and software information as possible when publishing or submitting a result.

We encourage visitors to our site to explore the XPRT results database. There are three primary ways to do so. The first is by visiting the main BenchmarkXPRT results browser, which displays results entries for all of the XPRT benchmarks in chronological order (see the screenshot below). Users can narrow the results by selecting a benchmark from the drop-down menu and can type values, such as vendor or the name of a tech publication, into the free-form filter field. For results we produced in our lab, clicking “PT” in the Source column takes you to a page with additional disclosure information for the test system. For sources outside our lab, clicking the source name takes you to the original article or review that contains the result.

The second way to access our published results is by visiting the results page for each individual XPRT benchmark. Go the page of the benchmark you’re interested in, and look for the blue View Results button. Clicking it takes you to a page that displays results for only that benchmark. You can use the free-form filter on the page to filter those results, and can use the Benchmarks drop-down menu to jump to the other individual XPRT results pages.

The third way to view information in our results database is with the WebXPRT Processor Comparison Chart. When we publish a new WebXPRT result, the score automatically appears in the processor comparison chart as well. For each processor, the chart shows a bar representing the average score. Mousing over the bar displays a popup indicating the number of WebXPRT results we currently have for that processor and clicking the bar lets you view the results. You can change the number of results the chart displays on each page, and use the drop-down menu to toggle back and forth between the WebXPRT 3 and WebXPRT 2015 charts.

We hope you’ll take some time to browse the information in our results database. We welcome your feedback about what you’d like to see in the future and suggestions for improvement. Our database contains the XPRT scores that we’ve gathered, but we publish them as a resource for you. Let us know what you think!

Justin

Transparent goals

Recently, Forbes published an article discussing a new report on phone battery life from Which?, a UK consumer advocacy group. In the report, Which? states that they tested the talk time battery life of 50 phones from five brands. During the tests, phones from three of the brands lasted longer than the manufacturers’ claims, while phones from another brand underperformed by about five percent. The fifth brand’s published battery life numbers were 18 to 51 percent higher than Which? recorded in their tests.

Folks can read the article for more details about the tests and the brands. While the report raises some interesting questions, and the article provides readers with brief test methodology descriptions from Which? and one manufacturer, we don’t know enough about the tests to say which set of claims is correct. Any number of variables related to test workloads or device configuration settings could significantly affect the results. Both parties may be using sound benchmarking principles in good faith, but their test methodologies may not be comparable. As it is, we simply don’t have enough information to evaluate the study.

Whether the issue is battery life or any other important device spec, information conflicts, such as the one that the Forbes article highlights, can leave consumers scratching their heads, trying to decide which sources are worth listening to. At the XPRTs, we believe that the best remedy for this type of problem is to provide complete transparency into our testing methodologies and development process. That’s why our lab techs verify all the hardware specs for each XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight entry. It’s why we publish white papers explaining the structure of our benchmarks in detail, as well as how the XPRTs calculate performance results. It’s also why we employ an open development community model and make each XPRT’s source code available to community members. When we’re open about how we do things, it encourages the kind of honest dialogue between vendors, journalists, consumers, and community members that serves everyone’s best interests.

If you love tech and share that same commitment to transparency, we’d love for you to join our community, where you can access XPRT source code and previews of upcoming benchmarks. Membership is free for anyone with a verifiable corporate affiliation. If you have any questions about membership or the registration process, please feel free to ask.

Justin

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