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Category: Google

Let the XPRTs be your holiday shopping companion!

The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, and choosing the right tech gift can be a daunting task. If you’re considering new phones, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, or desktops as gifts this year, and are unsure where to get reliable device information, the XPRTs can help!

The XPRTs provide objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance that can help cut through competing marketing claims. For example, instead of guessing whether the performance of a new phone justifies its price, you can use its WebXPRT performance score to see how it stacks up against both older models and competitors while tackling everyday tasks.

A good place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 3,500 test results from over 165 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. You can find a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. Learn how to use the results browser here.

If you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for it. Go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT,” or enter the name of the device and the appropriate XPRT (e.g., “Pixel” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that used the XPRTs to evaluate popular devices:


The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

Support for MobileXPRT 3 will likely end soon

In a past blog post, we discussed our plan to move several older versions of XPRT benchmarks to an XPRT archive page. Some of those legacy XPRTs still function correctly, and testers occasionally use them, but a few no longer work on the latest versions of the operating systems or browsers that we designed them to test. With the archive page, we can prevent potential confusion for new users who visit current XPRT pages, but still provide longtime users with continued access to old tests.

You can find more information about the XPRTs that we’ll be moving to the archive page here, but today, we want to let MobileXPRT users know that there’s a high likelihood that MobileXPRT 3 will be joining the list of archived XPRTs in the very near future. The Google Play Store has notified us that, due to evolving requirements for apps in newer versions of Android, we must update our MobileXPRT 3 app package to target an Android API level within one year of the latest Android release. If we don’t update the app to meet that requirement by November 1, users will no longer be able to access MobileXPRT 3 through the Google Play Store.

Though a small number of labs and reviewers still use MobileXPRT 3 to test phones and tablets around the world, we don’t feel current usage is high enough for us to justify committing resources to an update at this point. We had hoped that even if MobileXPRT 3 became inaccessible via the Google Play Store, it would still be possible to sideload the app for testing on newer Android devices. After experimenting with installation options in the lab, however, we think it’s likely that settings on devices running Android 11 and up will prevent both Google Play and sideload installations after November 1. The situation may change, but right now, we don’t expect any method to work after that date. If you try, you’ll likely encounter a message during the installation process that says, “This app was built for an older version of Android and may not work properly. Try checking for updates, or contact the developer.” If you attempt to continue the installation process after that message appears, the app will crash.

Both Android and Chrome developers know that the respective stores sometimes extend these types of deadlines. We hope that will be the case here, but we have no information that would lead us to anticipate an extension. If there is no extension, we will still make MobileXPRT 3 available for testing on older Android devices, but we will then have to move it to the XPRT archive page.

We’re grateful for everyone who has used MobileXPRT 3 in the past, and we apologize for any convenience this change may cause. If you have any questions or concerns about MobileXPRT 3 access, please let us know

Justin

The XPRTs can help with your holiday shopping!

The holiday shopping season is fast approaching, and choosing the right tech gift can often be a daunting task. If you’re considering phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops as gifts, and are unsure where to get reliable device information, the XPRTs can help!

The XPRTs provide objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance that can help to cut through the marketing noise. For example, instead of guessing whether the performance of a new laptop lives up to its billing, you can use its WebXPRT performance score to see how it stacks up against the competition on everyday tasks.

A good place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 3,200 test results from over 165 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. You can find a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. Learn how to use the results browser here.

If you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for it. You can find these reviews by going to your favorite tech review site and searching for “XPRT,” or entering the name of the device and the appropriate XPRT (e.g., “iPhone” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that used the XPRTs to evaluate popular devices:

The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

CrXPRT 2 on FydeOS!

Recently, a tester contacted us with details from a CrXPRT 2 performance test run that they’d successfully completed on… an Apple MacBook Pro! Because CrXPRT 2 is a Chrome Web App that we designed for Chrome OS, it was quite a surprise to hear that it is now possible to run CrXPRT 2 on non-Chrome OS platforms by using FydeOS.

FydeOS is an operating system based on a fork of the Chromium OS project. Developers originally intended FydeOS to be a Google-independent, Chrome-like alternative for the Chinese educational market, but FydeOS is now available to the English-speaking consumer and enterprise markets as well. FydeOS users can run a Chrome-like OS on something other than a Chromebook or a Chromebox, such as a PC, Mac, virtual machine, or even a Raspberry Pi device. Additionally, FydeOS supports Android, Chrome OS, and Linux apps, and users can run those apps at the same time on the same screen.

We have not yet conducted any testing with FydeOS in our lab, but we wanted to pass along this information to any readers who may be interested. If the OS operates as described, it may provide a way for us to experiment with using CrXPRT 2 in some interesting cross-platform tests.

Justin

Using WebXPRT 3 to compare the performance of popular browsers in Windows 10 and Windows 11

People choose a default web browser based on several factors. Speed is sometimes the deciding factor, but privacy settings, memory load, ecosystem integration, and web app capabilities can also come into play. Regardless of the motivations behind a person’s go-to browser choice, the dominance of software-as-a-service (SaaS) computing means that new updates are always right around the corner. In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about how browser speed can increase or decrease significantly after an update, only to swing back in the other direction shortly thereafter. OS-specific optimizations can also affect performance, such as with Microsoft Edge on Windows and Google Chrome on Chrome OS.

Windows 11 began rolling out earlier this month, and tech press outlets such as AnandTech and PCWorld have used WebXPRT 3 to evaluate the impact of the new OS—or specific settings in the OS—on browser performance. Our own in-house tests, which we discuss below, show a negligible impact on browser performance when updating our test system from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It’s important to note that depending on a system’s hardware setup, the impact might be more significant in certain scenarios. For more information about such scenarios, we encourage you to read the PCWorld article discussing the impact of the Windows 11 default virtualization-based security (VBS) settings on browser performance in some instances.

In our comparison tests, we used a Dell XPS 13 7930 with an Intel Core i3-10110U processor and 4 GB of RAM. For the Windows 10 tests, we used a clean Windows 10 Home image updated to version 20H2 (19042.1165). For the Windows 11 tests, we updated the system to Windows 11 Home version 21H2 (22000.282). On each OS version, we ran WebXPRT 3 three times on the latest versions of five browsers: Brave, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. For each browser, the score we post below is the median of the three test runs.

In our last round of tests on Windows 10, Firefox was the clear winner. Three of the Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, and Opera) produced very close scores, and the performance of Brave lagged by about 7 percent. In this round of Windows 10 testing, performance on every browser improved slightly, with Google Chrome taking a slight lead over Firefox.

In our Windows 11 testing, we were interested to find that without exception, browser scores were slightly lower than in Windows 10 testing. However, none of the decreases were statistically significant. Most users performing daily tasks are unlikely to notice that degree of difference.

Have you observed any significant differences in WebXPRT 3 scores after upgrading to Windows 11? If so, let us know!

Justin

Reports of CloudXPRT installation failures

Recently, CloudXPRT testers have reported installation failures while attempting to set up CloudXPRT on Ubuntu virtual machines with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. We have not yet determined whether the installation process fails consistently on these VMs or the problem occurs under only specific conditions. We believe these failures occur with only GCP and Azure, and you should still be able to successfully install and run CloudXPRT on both Amazon Web Services virtual machines and on-premises gear.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue causes for CloudXPRT testers and will let the community know as soon as we identify a reliable solution. If you have encountered any other issues during CloudXPRT testing, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

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