Tag Archives: WebXPRT

WebXPRT 3, Mobile World Congress, and the next HDXPRT

on February 8, 2018

We’re excited about everything that’s in store for the XPRTs, and we want to update community members on what to expect in the next few months.

The next major development is likely to be the WebXPRT 3 general release. We’re currently refining the UI and conducting extensive testing with the community preview build. We’re not ready to announce a firm release date, but hope to do so over the next few weeks. Please try the community preview and give us your feedback, if you haven’t already.

During the last week of February, Mark will be at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Each year, MWC offers a great opportunity to examine the new trends and technologies that will shape mobile technology in the years to come. We look forward to sharing Mark’s thoughts on this year’s hot topics. Will you be attending MWC this year? If so, let us know!

In addition, we’re hoping to have a community preview of the next HDXPRT ready in the spring. As we mentioned a few months ago, we’re updating the workloads, applications, and UI. For the converting photos scenario, we’re considering incorporating new Adobe Photoshop tools such as the “Open Closed Eyes” feature and an automatic fix for pictures that are out of focus due to handheld camera shake. For the converting videos scenario, we’re including 4K GoPro footage that represents the quality of video captured by today’s “prosumer” demographic.

What features would you like to see in the next HDXPRT? Let us know!

Justin

Gearing up for a busy year ahead

By Justin Greene

on January 4, 2018

We hope everyone’s 2018 kicked off on a happy note, and you’re starting the year rested, refreshed, and inspired. Here at the XPRTs, we already have a busy slate of activity lined up, and we want to share a quick preview of what community members can expect in the coming months.

Next week, I’ll be travelling to CES 2018 in Las Vegas. CES provides us with a great opportunity to survey emerging tech and industry trends, and I look forward to sharing my thoughts and impressions from the show. If you’re attending this year, and would like to meet and discuss any aspect of the XPRTs, let me know.

There’s also more WebXPRT news to come. We’re working on several new features for the WebXPRT Processor Comparison Chart that we think will prove to be useful, and we hope to take the updated chart live very soon. We’re also getting closer to the much-anticipated WebXPRT 3 general release! If you’ve been testing the WebXPRT 3 Community Preview, be sure to send in your feedback soon.

Work on the next version of HDXPRT is progressing as well, and we’ll share more details about UI and workload updates as we get closer to a community preview build.

Last but not least, we’re considering the prospect of updating TouchXPRT and MobileXPRT later in the year. We look forward to working with the community on improved versions of each of those benchmarks.

Justin

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged CES, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT

WebXPRT and user-agent strings

By Justin Greene

on August 31, 2017

After running WebXPRT in Microsoft Edge, a tester recently asked why the browser information field on the results page displayed “Chrome 52 – Edge 15.15063.” It’s a good question; why would the benchmark report Chrome 52 when Microsoft Edge is the browser under test? The answer lies in understanding user-agent strings and the way that WebXPRT gathers specific bits of information.

When browsers request a web page from a hosting server, they send an array of basic header information that allows the server to determine the client’s capabilities and the best way to provide the requested content. One of these headers, the user-agent, presents a string of tokens that provide information about the application making the request, the operating system and version, rendering engine compatibility, and browser platform details. In effect, the user-agent string is a way for a browser to tell the hosting server the full extent of its capabilities.

When WebXPRT attempts to identify a browser, it references the browser token in the user-agent string.

The process is generally straightforward, but in some cases, browsers spoof information from other browsers in their user-agent strings, which makes accurate browser detection difficult. The reasons for this are complex, but they involve web development practices and the fact that some web pages are not designed to recognize and work well with new or less-popular browsers. When we released WebXPRT 2015, Microsoft Edge was new. The Edge team wanted to make sure that as much advanced web content as possible would be available to Edge users, so they created a user-agent string that declared itself to be several different browsers at once.

I can see this in action if I check Edge’s user-agent string on my system. Currently, it reports “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; ServiceUI 9) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36 Edge/15.15063.” So, because of the way Edge’s user-agent string is constructed, and the way WebXPRT parses that information, the browser information field on WebXPRT’s results page will report “Chrome 52 – Edge 15.15063” on my system.

To try this on your system, in Edge, select the ellipses icon in the top right-hand corner, then F12 Developer Tools. Next, select the Console tab, and run “javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent).” A popup window will display the UA string.

You can find instructions for finding the user-agent string in other browsers here: http://techdows.com/2016/07/edge-ie-chrome-firefox-user-agent-strings.html.

In the next version of WebXPRT, we’ll work to refine the way that the test parses user-agent strings, and provide more accurate system information for testers. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding this topic, let us know!

Justin

Posted in Browser-based benchmarks, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015 | Also tagged browsers, Chrome, Microsoft Edge

Tag Archives: WebXPRT

WebXPRT 3, Mobile World Congress, and the next HDXPRT

Gearing up for a busy year ahead

WebXPRT and user-agent strings

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