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Month: February 2022

WebXPRT 4 is live!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 28, 2022

We’re excited to announce that WebXPRT 4 is now available! Testers can access the benchmark at WebXPRT.com. If you’ve already been using the WebXPRT 4 Preview, your Preview test results will be comparable with results from the current official build.

Longtime WebXPRT users will notice that WebXPRT 4 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 will continue to make WebXPRT 3 available for legacy testing.

If you missed earlier XPRT blog posts about WebXPRT 4, here is a quick overview of the differences between WebXPRT 3 and WebXPRT 4:

General changes

  • We’ve updated the aesthetics of the WebXPRT UI to make WebXPRT 4 visually distinct from older versions. We did not significantly change the flow of the UI.
  • We’ve updated content in some of the workloads to reflect changes in everyday technology, such as upgrading most of the photos in the photo processing workloads to higher resolutions.
  • We’ve updated the base calibration system for score calculations, and adjusted the scoring scale. WebXPRT 4 scores should not be compared to scores from previous versions of WebXPRT.

Workload changes

  • Photo Enhancement. We increased the efficiency of the workload’s Canvas object creation function, and replaced the existing photos with new, higher-resolution photos.
  • Organize Album Using AI. We replaced ConvNetJS with WebAssembly (WASM) based OpenCV.js for both the face detection and image classification tasks. We changed the images for the image classification tasks to images from the ImageNet dataset.
  • Stock Option Pricing. We updated the dygraph.js library.
  • Sales Graphs. We made no changes to this workload.
  • Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan. We replaced ASM.js with WASM for the Notes task and updated the WASM-based Tesseract version for the OCR task.
  • Online Homework. In addition to the existing scenario which uses four Web Workers, we have added a scenario with two Web Workers. The workload now covers a wider range of Web Worker performance, and we calculate the score by using the combined run time of both scenarios. We also updated the typo.js library.

We’re thankful for all of the feedback we received during the WebXPRT 4 development process, and we look forward to seeing your WebXPRT 4 results!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Cross-platform benchmarks, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, webxprt 4 | Tagged , , , , , , |

WebXPRT 4 is almost here!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 24, 2022

We’re putting the last pieces in place for the WebXPRT 4 GA, and expect to take the final build live by this time next week! When we released the WebXPRT 4 Preview and encouraged testers to submit and publish results, we said we’d try to limit any changes to things that would not affect test scores. We’re happy to report that we’ve achieved that goal, and Preview testing results are comparable with GA build results.

If you missed the blog post about the differences between WebXPRT 3 and WebXPRT 4, we encourage you to check it out. Everything we mentioned about the general and workload-specific changes in the Preview build holds true for the upcoming GA.

Keep an eye on the blog and WebXPRT.com for more information in the coming week. We look forward to seeing your test results!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Cross-platform benchmarks, Performance benchmarking, results, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, webxprt 4 | Tagged , , , , , |

A note about WebXPRT 4 and Internet Explorer

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 10, 2022

During some recent internal WebXPRT 4 Preview testing, we discovered that the WebXPRT 4 Preview does not run in Internet Explorer (IE) 11. In fact, before the first workload begins in IE, the WebXPRT 4 built-in WebAssembly (WASM) check fails and produces an error message.

The reason we haven’t tested WebXPRT 4 on IE 11 before now is that Internet Explorer is currently in its end-of-life phase. Microsoft has been removing support for IE 11 in Microsoft 365 and other apps for some time, they did not include the desktop version of IE 11 in Windows 11, and they are removing support for IE 11 in Windows 10 on June 15, 2022. Among Windows users, the most popular browsers are now Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox.

We’re proud that WebXPRT has historically had broad, cross-platform compatibility in almost any browser. However, the modern web is rapidly incorporating powerful tools such as WASM that do not work in older legacy browsers. To maintain the benchmark’s relevance in future years, we need to deprioritize some level of legacy compatibility, and this begins with WebXPRT 4 release.

For the WebXPRT testers who wish to continue testing with IE 11, WebXPRT 3 will remain on our site for the foreseeable future. Barring any further changes from Microsoft, the benchmark should continue to run in existing instances of the Internet Explorer desktop app.

The official WebXPRT 4 launch is approaching, and we hope to announce the release date within the next few weeks! Until that time, we will continue to share the latest updates here in the blog. If you have any questions or comments about WebXPRT 4 or compatibility with legacy browsers, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, Browser-based benchmarks, Cross-platform benchmarks, Google Chrome, Performance benchmarking, Web-based testing, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, webxprt 4, Windows 11 | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Updated system configuration recommendations for CrXPRT 2 battery life tests

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 3, 2022

Recently, we heard from a BenchmarkXPRT Development Community member who was testing Chromebooks in their lab. On a few of the Chromebooks, they saw sporadic CrXPRT 2 battery life test failures where CrXPRT 2 would successfully complete a battery life test and produce a result for the initial run, but then fail at the end of later runs.

After a considerable amount of troubleshooting, they determined that the issue seemed to be related to the way some systems automatically shut down before the battery is completely exhausted, and the way some systems will automatically boot up once the tester plugs in the power adapter for charging. This member found that when they added a few system configuration steps before battery life tests and made slight changes to their post-test routine, the systems that had previously experienced consistent failures would successfully complete battery life tests and produce results.

The added steps are quick and straightforward, and we decided to add them to the Configuring the test device and Running the tests sections of the CrXPRT 2 user manual. We hope this updated guidance will help to prevent future frustration for CrXPRT 2 testers.

If you have any questions or comments about the CrXPRT 2 battery life test, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

Posted in battery life, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Google Chrome | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

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