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Category: CrXPRT

WebXPRT can help you choose the right back-to-school tech

For many students, the excitement and anticipation of a new school year is right round the corner! In addition to being an opportunity to dive into new subjects, meet new people, and make progress toward learning goals, the back-to-school season often provides students and teachers with a chance to shop for new technology to meet their needs in the coming year. The tech marketplace can be confusing, however, with a slew of brands, options, and claims competing for back-to-school dollars.

Never fear: WebXPRT can help!

Whether you’re shopping for a new phone, tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop, WebXPRT can provide industry-trusted performance scores that can help give you confidence that you’re making a smart purchasing decision.

And in this age of AI, WebXPRT performance scores do account for specific AI tasks. The benchmark includes timed AI tasks in two workloads, which reflect the types of light browser-side inference tasks that are now quite common in consumer-oriented web applications and extensions. You can read more about that in previous blog entries on the “Organize Album using AI” and “Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan” workloads.

To see how devices stack up, the WebXPRT 4 results viewer is a good place to start. The viewer displays the WebXPRT 4 scores of over 975 devices—including many of the hottest new releases—and we’re adding more scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another way to find WebXPRT scores is to go directly to the tech press. If you’re considering a popular device, there’s a good chance that a recent tech review includes a WebXPRT score for that device. There are two quick ways to find these reviews: You can either (1) search for “WebXPRT” on a tech review site or (2) use a search engine and enter the device name and WebXPRT as search terms, such as “Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon” and “WebXPRT.”

Here are a few recent articles and tech reviews that used WebXPRT:


If you’re excited about the opportunity to buy new tech for school, WebXPRT can provide you with the information you need to make more confident tech purchases. As this new school year begins, we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about WebXPRT or WebXPRT scores!

Justin

CrXPRT 2 functionality is ending with ChromeOS 139

Back in January, we discussed the ChromeOS team’s decision to eventually end support for all user-installed Chrome Apps—including CrXPRT 2—upon the release of Chrome 138 in July of this year. As best we can tell, the move is part of their overall strategy of transitioning all support to Chrome extensions and Progressive Web Apps. We knew that after the support cutoff date, we would not be able to publish any fixes or updates for CrXPRT 2, but we weren’t exactly sure how the transition would affect the app’s overall functionality.

We’ve now confirmed that while CrXPRT 2 still functions normally through Chrome 138.0.7204.255 (beta), the app does not launch at all on Chrome Canary 139. Consequently, we expect that stable channel system updates will disable CrXPRT 2 on most systems after Chrome 139 goes live on August 5th. We will initially leave CrXPRT 2 on our site for those who want to use it on older versions of Chrome, but over time we will archive it as an inactive benchmark.

We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to the many people around the world who used CrXPRT 2 for lab evaluations, product reviews, and individual testing over the past several years. We’re grateful for your support! We will update readers here in the blog if we decide to pursue new ChromeOS benchmark development work in the future.

Justin

Recent XPRT mentions in articles, reviews, and more!

Here at the XPRTs, our primary goal is to provide free, easy-to-use benchmark tools that can help everyone—from OEM labs to tech press journalists to individual consumers—understand how well devices will perform while completing everyday computing tasks. We track progress toward that goal in several ways, but one of the most important is how much people use and discuss the XPRTs. When the name of one of our apps appears in an ad, article, or tech review, we call it a “mention.” Tracking mentions helps us gauge our reach.

We occasionally like to share a sample of recent XPRT mentions here in the blog. If you just started following the XPRTs, it may be surprising to see our program’s global reach. If you’re a longtime reader and you’re used to seeing WebXPRT or CrXPRT in major tech press articles, it may be surprising to learn more about overseas tech press publications or see how some government agencies use the XPRTs to make decisions. In any case, we hope you’ll enjoy exploring the links below!

Recent mentions include:

If you’d like to receive monthly updates on XPRT-related news and activity, we encourage you to sign up for the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community newsletter. It’s completely free, and all you need to do to join the newsletter mailing list is let us know! We won’t publish, share, or sell any of the contact information you provide, and we’ll only send you the monthly newsletter and occasional benchmark-related announcements, such as important news about patches or releases.

If you have any questions about the XPRTs, suggestions, or requests for future blog topics, please feel free to contact us.

Justin

An update on CrXPRT support in ChromeOS

CrXPRT users may remember that back in 2022, we discussed the ChromeOS team’s decision to end formal support for Chrome Apps and instead focus on Chrome extensions and Progressive Web Apps. This decision meant that we would not be able to publish any future fixes or updates for CrXPRT 2, although moving forward, we weren’t sure how it would affect the app’s functionality.

After receiving a lot of feedback regarding their original timeline, the ChromeOS team decided to extend Chrome App support for Enterprise and Education account customers through January 2025. Because we publish CrXPRT through a private BenchmarkXPRT developer account, we assumed at the time that the support extension would not apply to CrXPRT.

Recently, the ChromeOS team released new information about their scheduled support timeline. Now, they plan to end formal support for all user-installed Chrome Apps in July 2025 (Chrome 138). In February 2028, the Chrome 168 release will mark the end of life for all Chrome Apps.

The good news is that—in spite of a lack of formal ChromeOS support over the past couple of years—the CrXPRT 2 performance and battery life tests have continued to run without any known issues. As of today, the app functions normally up through the Beta release of ChromeOS version 132.0.6834.52.

We will continue to run the benchmark on a regular basis to monitor functionality, and we will disclose any future issues here in the blog and on CrXPRT.com. We hope the app will continue to run both performance and battery life tests well into the future. However, given the frequency of Chrome updates, it’s difficult for us to predict how long the benchmark will remain viable.

If you have any questions about CrXPRT, please let us know!

Justin

Recent XPRT mentions in the global tech press

One way we assess the XPRTs’ ongoing effectiveness is to regularly track the reach of our benchmarks in the global tech press. If tech journalists decide to include an XPRT benchmark in their suite of “go-to” performance evaluation tools, we know that decision reflects a high degree of confidence in the relevance and reliability of our benchmarks. It’s especially exciting for us to see the XPRTs win the trust of more tech press outlets in an ever-increasing number of countries around the world.

Because some of our newer readers may be unaware of the wide variety of tech press outlets that use the XPRTs, we occasionally like to share an overview of recent XPRT-related global tech press activity. For today’s blog, we want to give readers a sampling of the press mentions we’ve seen over the past few months.

Recent mentions include:

If you’d like to receive monthly updates on XPRT news, we encourage you to sign up for the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community newsletter. Each month, the newsletter delivers a summary of the previous month’s XPRT-related activity, including XPRT blog posts and new mentions of the XPRTs in the tech press. If you don’t currently receive the monthly BenchmarkXPRT newsletter but would like to join the mailing list, please let us know! It’s free to join. We won’t publish, share, or sell any of the contact information you provide, and we’ll send you only the monthly newsletter and occasional benchmark-related announcements, such as news about patches or new releases.

If you have any questions about the XPRTs, suggestions for improvement, or requests for future blogs, please just contact us.

Justin

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

Check out the other XPRTs:

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