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Celebrating 10 years of WebXPRT!

We’re excited to announce that it’s been 10 years since the initial launch of WebXPRT! In early 2013, we introduced WebXPRT as a unique browser performance benchmark in a market space that was already crowded with a variety of specialized measurement tools. Our goal was to offer a benchmark that could compare the performance of almost any web-enabled device, using scenarios created to mirror real-world tasks. We wanted it to be a free, easily accessible, easy-to-run, useful, and appealing testing option for OEM labs, vendors, and the tech press.

When we look back on the last 10 years of WebXPRT, we can’t help but conclude that our efforts have been successful. Since those early days, the WebXPRT market presence has grown from humble beginnings into a worldwide industry standard. Hundreds of tech press publications have used WebXPRT in thousands of articles and reviews, and testers have now run the benchmark well over 1.1 million times.

Below, I’ve listed some of the WebXPRT team’s accomplishments over the last decade. If you’ve been following WebXPRT from the beginning, this may all be familiar, but if you’re new to the  community, it may be interesting to see some of the steps that contributed to making WebXPRT what it is today.

In future blog posts, we’ll look at how the number of WebXPRT runs has grown over time, and how WebXPRT use has grown among OEMs, vendors, and the tech press worldwide. Do you have any thoughts that you’d like to share from your WebXPRT testing experience? If so, let us know!

Justin

The Mobile World Congress 2023 recap video is live!

Once again, the talented studio team here at Principled Technologies has worked with the XPRT team to put together some great content. This week, we published a recap video of Mark’s recent trip to Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona. In the video, Mark discusses how “velocity” was the headline theme of this year’s MWC, but infrastructure was the true backbone of the show. The challenges of developing the infrastructure necessary for tomorrow’s tech aren’t limited to obvious topics like 5G deployment, bandwidth, and accessibility; they also include “soft” infrastructure topics like security, management, and reliability. As everything gets faster, we’ll need tools such as the XPRTs to provide reliable information about which devices can handle the increased demands of tomorrow’s tech.

We encourage you to check out the video, along with Mark’s blog post from the show and MWC-related photos on social media. To view the video, you can follow this link or click the screenshot below. If you attended or followed MWC this year and have any thoughts about how the XPRTs can help to evaluate cutting-edge technologies, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

Mobile World Congress 2023: Infrastructure led the way

When the tech industry is at its best, a virtuous cycle of capabilities and use cases chases its own tail to produce ever-better tech for us all. Faster CPUs drive new usage models, which in turn emerge and swamp the CPUs, which then must get faster. Better screens make us want higher-quality video, which requires more bandwidth to deliver and causes us to desire even better displays. Apps connect us in more ways, but those connections require more bandwidth, which leads to new apps that can take advantage of those faster connections. And on and on.

Put a finger on the cycle at any given moment, and you’ll see that while all the elements are in motion, some are the stars of the moment. To keep the cycle going, it’s crucial for these areas to improve the most. At Mobile World Congress 2023 (#MWC23), that distinction belonged to infrastructure. Yes, some new mobile phones were on display, Lenovo showed off new ThinkPads, and other mobile devices were in abundance, but as I walked the eight huge halls, I couldn’t help but notice the heavy emphasis on infrastructure.

5G, for example, is real now—but it’s far from everywhere. Telecom providers have to figure out how to profitably build out the networks necessary to support it. The whole industry must solve the problems of delivering 5G at huge scale, handle the traffic increases it will bring, switch and route the data, and ultimately make sure the end devices can take full advantage of that data. Management and security remain vital whenever data is flying around, so those softer pieces of infrastructure also matter greatly.

Inevitably and always, to know if we as an industry are meeting these challenges, we must measure performance—both in the raw speed sense and in the broader sense of the word. Are we seeing the full bandwidth we expect? Are devices handling the data properly and at speed? Where’s the bottleneck now? Are we delivering on the schedules we promised? Questions such as these are key concerns in every tech cycle—and some of them are exactly what the XPRTs focus on.

As we improve our infrastructure, we hope to see the benefits at a personal level. When you’re using a device—whether it’s a smart watch, a mobile phone, or a laptop—you need it to do its job well, respond to you quickly, and show you what you want when you want it. When your device makes you wait, it can be helpful to know if the bandwidth feeding data to the device is the bottleneck or if the device simply can’t keep up with the flow of data it’s receiving. The XPRTs can help you figure out what’s going on, and they will continue to be useful and important as the tech cycle spins on. If history is our guide, the infrastructure focus of MWC23 will lead to greater capabilities that require even better devices down the line. We look forward to testing them.

The XPRTs will be at Mobile World Congress later this month!

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!

Justin

Comparing the performance of popular browsers with WebXPRT 4

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!

Justin

Looking back on 2022 with the XPRTs

Around the beginning of each new year, we like to take the opportunity to look back and summarize the XPRT highlights from the previous year. Readers of our newsletter are familiar with the stats and updates we include each month, but for our blog readers who don’t receive the newsletter, we’ve compiled some highlights from 2022 below.

Benchmarks
In the past year, we released WebXPRT 4, and the CloudXPRT v1.2 update package.

XPRTs in the media
Journalists, advertisers, and analysts referenced the XPRTs thousands of times in 2022. It’s always rewarding to know that the XPRTs have proven to be useful and reliable assessment tools for technology publications around the world. Media sites that used the XPRTs in 2022 include AnandTech, Android Authority, Benchlife.info (China), BodNara (South Korea), ComputerBase (Germany), DISKIDEE (Belgium), eTeknix, Expert Reviews, Gadgets 360, Hardware.info (The Netherlands), Hardware Zone (Singapore), ITC.ua (Ukraine), ITmedia (Japan), Itndaily.ru (Russia), Notebookcheck, PCMag, PC-Welt (Germany), PCWorld, TechPowerUp, Tom’s Guide, TweakTown, and ZOL.com (China).

Downloads and confirmed runs
In 2022, we had more than 10,800 benchmark downloads and 183,300 confirmed runs. Users have run our most popular benchmark, WebXPRT, more than 1,135,500 times since its debut in 2013! WebXPRT continues to be a go-to, industry-standard performance benchmark for OEM labs, vendors, and leading tech press outlets around the globe.

XPRT media, tools, and publications
Part of our mission with the XPRTs is to produce tools and materials that help testers better understand the ins and outs of benchmarking in general and the XPRTs in particular. To help achieve this goal, we published the following in 2022:

We’re thankful for everyone who used the XPRTs, joined the community, and sent questions and suggestions throughout 2022. We’re excited to see what’s in store for the XPRTs in 2023!

Justin

Check out the other XPRTs:

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