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Multi-tab testing in a future version of WebXPRT?

In previous posts about our recommended best practices for producing consistent and reliable WebXPRT scores, we’ve emphasized the importance of “clean” testing. Clean testing involves minimizing the amount of background activity on a system during test runs to ensure stable test conditions. With stable test conditions, we can avoid common scenarios in which startup tasks, automatic updates, and other unpredictable processes contribute to high score variances and potentially unfair comparisons.

Clean testing is a vital part of accurate performance benchmarking, but it doesn’t always show us what kind of performance we can expect in typical everyday conditions. For example, while a browser performance test like WebXPRT can provide clean testing scores that serve as a valuable proxy for overall system performance, an entire WebXPRT test run involves only two open browser tabs. Most of us will have many more tabs open at any given time during the day. Those tabs—and any associated background services, extensions, plug-ins, or renderers—have the potential to require CPU cycles and frequently consume memory resources. Depending on the number of tabs you leave open, the performance impact on your system can be noticeable. Even with modern browser tab management and resource-saving features, a proliferation of tabs can still have a significant impact on your computing experience.

To address this type of computing, we’ve been considering the possibility of adding one or more multi-tab testing features to a future version of WebXPRT. There are several ways we could do this, including the following options:

  • We could open each full workload cycle in a new tab, resulting in seven total tabs.
  • We could open each individual workload iteration in a new tab, resulting in 42 total tabs.
  • We could allow users to run multiple full tests back-to-back while keeping the tabs from the previous test(s) open.

If we do decide to add multi-tab features to a future version of WebXPRT, we could integrate them into the main score or make them optional and thus not affect traditional WebXPRT testing. We’re looking at all these options.

Whenever we have multiple choices, we seek your input. We want to know if a feature like this is something you’d like to see. Below, you’ll find two quick survey questions that will help us gauge your interest in this topic. We would appreciate your input!

Would you be interested in using future WebXPRT multi-tab testing features?

How many browser tabs do you typically leave open at one time?

If you’d like to share additional thoughts or ideas related to possible multi-tab features, please let us know!

Justin

Putting together a good WebXPRT workload proposal

Recently, we announced that we’re moving forward with the development of a new AI-focused WebXPRT 4 workload. It will be an auxiliary workload, which means that it will run as a separate, optional test, and it won’t affect existing WebXPRT 4 tests or scores. Although the inspiration for this new workload came from internal WebXPRT discussions—and, let’s face it, from the huge increase in importance of AI—we wanted to remind you that we’re always open to hearing your WebXPRT workload ideas. If you’d like to submit proposals for new workloads, you don’t have to follow a formal process. Just contact us, and we’ll start the conversation.

If you do decide to send us a workload proposal, it will be helpful to know the types of parameters that we keep in mind. Below, we discuss some of the key questions we ask when we evaluate new WebXPRT workload ideas.

Will it be relevant and interesting to real users, lab testers, and tech reviewers?

When considering a WebXPRT workload proposal, the first two criteria are simple: is it relevant in real life, and are people interested in the workload? We created WebXPRT to evaluate device performance using web-based tasks that consumers are likely to experience daily, so real-life relevance has always been an essential requirement for us throughout development. There are many technologies, functions, and use cases that we could test in a web environment, but only some are relevant to common applications or usage patterns and are likely to draw the interest of real users, lab testers, and technical reviewers.

Will it have cross-platform support?

Currently, WebXPRT runs on almost any web browser and almost every device that supports a web browser. We would like to keep that level of cross-platform support when we introduce new workloads. However, technical differences in how various browsers execute tasks make it challenging to include certain scenarios without undermining our cross-platform ideal. When considering any workload proposal, one of the first questions we ask is, “Will it work on all the major browsers and operating systems?”

There are special exceptions to this guideline. For instance, we’re still in the early days of browser-based AI, and it’s unlikely that a new browser-based AI workload will run on every major browser. If it’s a particularly compelling idea, such as the AI scenario we’re currently working on, we may consider including it as an auxiliary test.

Will it differentiate performance between different types of devices?

XPRT benchmarks provide users with accurate measures for evaluating how well target systems or technologies perform specific tasks. With a broadly targeted benchmark like WebXPRT, if the workloads are so heavy that most devices can’t handle them or so light that most devices complete them without being taxed, the results will be of little use for helping buyers evaluating systems and making purchasing decisions, OEM labs, and the tech press.

That’s why, with any new WebXPRT workload, we look for a sweet spot with respect to how computationally demanding it will be. We want it to run on a wide range of devices—from low-end devices that are several years old to brand-new high-end devices, and everything in between. We also want users to see a wide range of workload scores and resulting overall scores that accurately reflect the experiences those systems deliver, so they can easily grasp the different performance capabilities of the devices under test.

Will results be consistent and easily replicated?

Finally, WebXPRT workloads should produce scores that consistently fall within an acceptable margin of error and are easily replicated with additional testing or comparable gear. Some web technologies are very sensitive to uncontrollable or unpredictable variables, such as internet speed. A workload that measures one of those technologies would be unlikely to produce results that are consistent and easily replicated.

We hope this post will be useful if you’re thinking about potential new workloads that you’d like to see in WebXPRT. If you have any general thoughts about browser performance testing or specific workload ideas that you’d like us to consider, please let us know.

Justin

Another milestone for WebXPRT!

Back in November, we discussed some of the trends we were seeing in the total number of completed and reported WebXPRT runs each month. The monthly run totals were increasing at a rate we hadn’t seen before. We’re happy to report that the upward trend has continued and even accelerated through the first quarter of this year! So far in 2024, we’ve averaged 43,744 WebXPRT runs per month, and our run total for the month of March alone (48,791) was more than twice the average monthly run total for 2023 (24,280).

The rapid increase in WebXPRT testing has helped us reach the milestone of 1.5 million runs much sooner than we anticipated. As the chart below shows, it took about six years for WebXPRT to log the first half-million runs and nine years to pass the million-run milestone. It’s only taken about one-and-a-half years to add another half-million.

This milestone means more to us than just reaching some large number. For a benchmark to be successful, it should ideally have widespread confidence and support from the benchmarking community, including manufacturers, OEM labs, the tech press, and other end users. When the number of yearly WebXPRT runs consistently increases, it’s a sign to us that the benchmark is serving as a valuable and trusted performance evaluation tool for more people around the world.

As always, we’re grateful for everyone who has helped us reach this milestone. If you have any questions or comments about using WebXPRT to test your gear, please let us know! And, if you have suggestions for how we can improve the benchmark, please share them. We want to keep making it better and better for you!

Justin

Comparing the WebXPRT 4 performance of five popular browsers

Every so often, we like to refresh 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 February, when we used WebXPRT 4 to compare the performance of five browsers on the same system.

For this round of tests, we used the same Dell XPS 13 7930 laptop as last time, which features an Intel Core i3-10110U processor and 4 GB of RAM, running Windows 11 Home updated to version 23H2 (22631.307). 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, the range between high and low scores was tight, with an overall difference of only 4.3 percent. Edge squeaked out a win, with a 2.1 percent performance advantage over Chrome. Firefox came in last, but was only one overall score point behind the tied score of Brave and Opera.

In this round of testing, the rank order did not change, but we saw more differentiation in the range of scores. While the performance of each browser improved, the range between high and low scores widened to a 19.1 percent difference between first-place Edge and last-place Firefox. The scores of the four Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Opera, Chrome, and Edge) all improved by at least 21 points, while the Firefox score only improved by one point. 

Do these results mean that Microsoft Edge will always provide a faster 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 may translate to your everyday experience.

Have you used WebXPRT 4 to compare browser performance on the same system? Let us know how it turned out!

Justin

Investigating a possible issue with WebXPRT 4 in iOS 17

Yesterday, Apple revealed the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro at its annual fall event, along with a new version of the iOS mobile operating system (iOS 17). The official iOS 17 launch will take place on September 18th, but before then, users of newer iPhones can install the OS via the Apple Beta Software Program.

Today, a tech journalist informed us that during their testing of iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro with iOS 17 Beta models, WebXPRT 4 has been freezing while running the Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan workload in the Safari 17 browser. Here in the lab, we were able to immediately replicate the issue on an iPhone 12 Pro with iOS 17 Beta model.

Our initial troubleshooting confirmed that WebXPRT 3 successfully runs to completion on iOS 17 Beta, so it appears that the problem is specific to WebXPRT 4. We also confirmed that WebXPRT 4 freezes at the same place when running in the Google Chrome browser on iOS 17 Beta, so we know that the problem does not occur only in Safari.

We’re currently investigating the issue, and will publish our findings here in the blog as soon as we feel confident that we’ve identified both the root cause and a workable solution, if a solution is necessary. One reason a solution would not be necessary is that the issue is a bug on the iOS 17 Beta side that Apple will resolve before the official launch.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue might cause for tech reviewers and iPhone users, and we appreciate your patience while we figure out what’s going on. If you have any questions about WebXPRT 4, please don’t hesitate to ask!

Justin

The WebXPRT 4 results viewer is live!

In October, we shared an early preview of the new results viewer tool that we’ve been developing in parallel with WebXPRT 4. The WebXPRT 4 Preview is now available to the public, and we’re excited to announce that the new results viewer is also live. We already have over 65 test results in the viewer, and in the weeks leading up to the WebXPRT 4 general release, we’ll be actively populating the viewer with the latest PT-curated WebXPRT 4 Preview results.

We encourage readers to visit the blog for details about the viewer’s features, and to take some time to explore the data. We’re excited about this new tool, which we view as an ongoing project with room for expansion and improvement based on user feedback.

If you have any questions or comments about the WebXPRT 4 Preview or the new results viewer, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

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