Mobile World Congress
(MWC) 2023 kicks off on
February 27th, and we’re excited that Mark Van Name will be
attending the event for the first time since the last pre-pandemic show in 2019. Each year, MWC offers a great opportunity to examine the
new trends and technologies that will shape mobile technology in the years
to come. The major themes of this year’s show include the latest advances in 5G
and IoT technologies, along with what GSMA is calling “Reality+.” Reality+
refers to the intersection of AI, AR, VR, and 5G, and the potential impacts of
these immersive technologies on our future.
Mark will be sharing his thoughts from this year’s show here in the XPRT blog, so be sure to stayed tuned. Will you be attending MWC this year? If so, let us know!
If you’ve been reading the XPRT blog for a while, you know that
we occasionally like to revisit a series of in-house WebXPRT comparison tests
to see if recent updates have changed the performance rankings of popular web
browsers. We published our most
recent comparison last April, when we
used WebXPRT 4 to compare the performance of five browsers on the same system.
For this round of tests, we used a Dell
XPS 13 7930, which features an Intel Core i3-10110U processor and 4 GB of RAM, running
Windows 11 Home updated to version 22H2 (22621.1105). We installed all current
Windows updates, and updated each of the browsers under test: Brave, Google
Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.
After the update process completed, we turned off updates to
prevent them from interfering with test runs. We ran WebXPRT 4 three times on each
of the five browsers. The score we post for each browser is the median of the
three test runs.
In our last round of tests, Edge was the clear winner, with a
2.2 percent performance advantage over Chrome. Firefox came in last, about 3
percent slower than Opera, which was in the middle of the pack. With updated
versions of the browsers, the only change in rank order was that Brave moved
into a tie with Opera.
While the rank order from this round of tests was very similar to the previous round, we did observe two clear performance trends: (1) the range between high and low scores was tighter, dropping from a difference of 7.8 percent to 4.3 percent, and (2) every browser demonstrated improved performance. The chart below illustrates both trends. Firefox showed the single largest score improvement at 7.8 percent, but the performance jump for each browser was considerable.
Do these results mean that Microsoft
Edge will always provide a speedier web experience, or Firefox will always be
slower than the others? Not necessarily. It’s true that a device with a higher
WebXPRT score will probably feel faster during daily web activities than one
with a much lower score, but your experience depends in part on the types of
things you do on the web, along with your system’s privacy settings, memory
load, ecosystem integration, extension activity, and web app capabilities.
In addition, browser speed can noticeably
increase or decrease after an update, and OS-specific optimizations can affect
performance, such as with Edge on Windows 11 and Chrome on Chrome OS. All these
variables are important to keep in mind when considering how WebXPRT results
translate to your everyday experience.
Have you used WebXPRT to compare browser performance on the same system? Let us know how it turned out!
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