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Tag Archives: WebXPRT 4

Recent XPRT mentions in articles, reviews, and more!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on April 10, 2025

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

Posted in AI, benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Dell, iPhone, Laptops, Simplified Chinese, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4 | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 2025 WebXPRT 4 browser performance comparisons

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 20, 2025

Once or twice per year, we refresh our ongoing series of WebXPRT comparison tests to see if software version updates have reordered the performance rankings of popular web browsers. We published our most recent comparison last June, when we used WebXPRT 4 to compare the performance of five browsers—Brave, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera—on a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 3. When assessing performance differences, it’s worth noting that all the browsers—except for Firefox—are built on a Chromium foundation. In the last round of tests, the scores were very tight, with a difference of only four percent between the last-place browser (Brave) and the winner (Chrome). Firefox’s score landed squarely in the middle of the pack.

Recently, we conducted a new set of tests to see how performance scores may have changed. To maintain continuity with our last comparison, we stuck with the same ThinkPad T14s as our reference system. That laptop is still in line with current mid-range laptops, so our comparison scores are likely to fall within the range of scores we would see from a typical user today. The ThinkPad is equipped with an Intel Core i7-1270P processor and 16 GB of RAM, and it’s running Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2 (22631.4890).

Before testing, we installed all current Windows updates, and we updated each of the browsers to the latest available stable version. After the update process was complete, we turned off updates to prevent any interference with test runs. We ran WebXPRT 4 five times on each of the five browsers. In Figure 1 below, each browser’s score is the median of the five test runs.

In this round of tests, the gap widened a bit between first and last place scores, with a difference of just over six percent between the lowest median score of 303 (Brave) and the highest median score of 322 (Firefox).

Figure 1: The median scores from running WebXPRT 4 five times with each browser on the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 3.

In this round of tests, the distribution of scores indicates that most users would not see a significant performance difference if they switched between the latest versions of these browsers. The one exception may be a change from the latest version of Brave to the latest version of Firefox. Even then, the quality of your browsing experience will often depend on other factors. The types of things you do on the web (e.g., gaming, media consumption, or multi-tab browsing), the type and number of extensions you’ve installed, and how frequently the browsers issue updates and integrate new technologies—among other things—can all affect browser performance over time. It’s important to keep such variables in mind when thinking about how browser performance comparison results may translate to your everyday web experience.

Have you tried using WebXPRT 4 in your own browser performance comparison? If so, we’d love to hear about it! Also, please let us know if there are other types of WebXPRT comparisons you’d like to see!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Brave, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Chrome, Chromium, Cross-platform benchmarks, Firefox, Google Chrome, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, Windows 11 | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The XPRTs: What would you like to see in 2025?

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on December 19, 2024

If you’re a new follower of the XPRT family of benchmarks, you may not be aware of one of the characteristics of the XPRTs that sets them apart from many benchmarking efforts—our openness and commitment to valuing the feedback of tech journalists, lab engineers, and anyone else that uses the XPRTs on a regular basis. That feedback helps us to ensure that as the XPRTs grow and evolve, the resources we offer will continue to meet the needs of those that use them.

In the past, user feedback has influenced specific aspects of our benchmarks, such as the length of test runs, UI features, results presentation, and the addition or subtraction of specific workloads. More broadly, we have also received suggestions for entirely new XPRTs and ways we might target emerging technologies or industry use cases.

As we look forward to what’s in store for the XPRTs in 2025, we’d love to hear your ideas about new XPRTs—or new features for existing XPRTs. Are you aware of hardware form factors, software platforms, new technologies, or prominent applications that are difficult or impossible to evaluate using existing performance benchmarks? Should we incorporate additional or different technologies into existing XPRTs through new workloads? Do you have suggestions for ways to improve any of the XPRTs or XPRT-related tools, such as results viewers?

We’re especially interested in your thoughts about the next steps for WebXPRT. If our recent blog posts about the potential addition of an AI-focused auxiliary workload, what a WebXPRT battery life test would entail, or possible WebAssembly-based test scenarios have piqued your interest, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

We’re genuinely interested in your answers to these questions and any other ideas you have, so please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and working together to figure out how they could help shape the XPRTs in 2025!

Justin

Posted in AI, Battery life, benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Using WebXPRT 4’s language options

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on November 26, 2024

Sohu, a major Chinese site, recently published a tech review discussing their first impressions from Intel Core Ultra 5 245K and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K white box testing. In the article, they included screenshots of the WebXPRT 4 test results they produced during their evaluation. The screenshots showed that the testers had enabled WebXPRT 4’s Simplified Chinese UI. They’re not the first to use this option, and it’s one we are glad worked for them.

Though WebXPRT’s language settings menu has proven to be a popular feature for many users around the world, some folks may not even know the option is there. In today’s blog, we’ll go over the basics of this simple but helpful testing option.

On WebXPRT’s Start screen, you can choose from three language options in the WebXPRT 4 UI: Simplified Chinese, German, and English. We included Simplified Chinese and German because of the large number of tests we see from China and Central Europe. We wanted to make testing a little easier for users who prefer those languages and we’re glad to see people using the options.

Changing languages in the WebXPRT UI is quick and easy. Locate the “Change Language?” prompt under the WebXPRT 4 logo at the top of the Start screen, and click or tap the arrow beside it. After the drop-down menu appears, select the language you want. The language of the start screen will then change to the language you selected, and the in-test workload headers and end-of-test results screen will also appear in the language you selected.

Figures 1–3 below my sig show the “Change Language?” drop-down menu and how the Start screen appears when you select Simplified Chinese or German. It’s important to note that if you have a translation extension installed in your browser, it may override the WebXPRT UI by reverting the language back to your browser’s default. You can avoid this conflict by temporarily disabling the browser’s translation extension for the duration of WebXPRT testing.

We hope WebXPRT 4’s language options will help facilitate the testing process for many users around the world. If you’re a frequent WebXPRT user and would like to see us add support for another language, please contact us. And, of course, if you have any questions about WebXPRT 4 testing, please let us know!

Justin

Figure 1: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen showing the language options drop-down menu.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen with a Simplified Chinese UI.
Figure 3: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen with a German UI.
Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Chinese, Cross-platform benchmarks, German, Performance benchmarking, Simplified Chinese, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Also tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Shop confidently this holiday season with the XPRTs!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on November 14, 2024

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and trying to find the right tech gift for your friends or loved ones (or yourself!) 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 industry-trusted and time-tested measures of a device’s performance that can help you cut through the fog of competing marketing claims. For example, instead of guessing whether the performance of a new gaming laptop 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 great place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 3,700 test results—across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices—from over 155 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, our own Principled Technologies (PT) testing, and independent submissions. For tips on how to use the XPRT results browser, check out this blog post.

Another way to view information in our results database is by using the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer provides an information-packed, interactive tool that we created to help people explore data from the set of almost 800 WebXPRT 4 results we’ve curated and published to date on our site. You’ll find detailed instructions in this blog post for how to use the WebXPRT 4 results viewer tool.

If you’re considering a popular device, it’s likely that a recent tech press review includes an XPRT score for it. To find those scores, go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT,” or enter 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:

In addition to XPRT-related resources in the tech press, here at PT we frequently publish reports that evaluate the performance of hot new consumer devices, and many of those reports include WebXPRT scores. For example, check out the results from our extensive testing of a Dell Latitude 7450 AI PC or our in-depth evaluation of three new Lenovo ThinkPad and ThinkBook laptops.

The XPRTs can help you make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season. 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

Posted in Acer, Apple, ASUS, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Dell, Google, holiday shopping, HP, iPhone, Lenovo, PCs, Phones, Samsung, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4 | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Speaking of potential future WebXPRT workloads

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on October 31, 2024

In recent blog posts, we’ve discussed several types of potential future WebXPRT workloads—from an auxiliary AI-focused workload to a WebXPRT battery life test—and many of the factors that we would need to consider when developing those workloads. In today’s post, we’re discussing other types of workloads that we may consider for future WebXPRT versions. We’re also inviting you to send us your WebXPRT workload ideas!

Currently, the most promising web technology for future WebXPRT workloads is WebAssembly (Wasm). Wasm is a binary instruction format that works across all modern browsers, provides a sandboxed environment that operates at native speeds, and takes advantage of common hardware specs across platforms. Wasm’s capabilities offer web developers significant flexibility in running complex client applications within the browser.

We first made use of Wasm in WebXPRT 4’s Organize Album and Encrypt Notes workloads, but Wasm has the potential to support many more types of test scenarios. Here are just a few of the use-case categories that Wasm supports:

  • Gaming
  • Image and video editing
  • Video augmentation
  • CAD applications
  • Interactive learning portals
  • Language translation

Those categories and the possibilities they open for additional workloads are exciting! When thinking through possible new workload scenarios, it’s important to remember that workload proposals need to fit within a set of basic guidelines that uphold WebXPRT’s strengths as a benchmark. You can read about those guidelines in more detail in this blog post, but in short, new workloads ideally should

  • be relevant to real-life scenarios
  • have cross-platform support
  • clearly differentiate in their performance between different types of devices
  • produce consistent and easily replicated results

After testing with WebXPRT or reviewing the list of use cases that Wasm supports, have you considered a new workload or test scenario that you would like to see? If so, please let us know! Your ideas could end up playing a role in shaping the next version of WebXPRT!

Justin

Posted in battery life, benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Cross-platform benchmarks, Future of performance evaluation, image processing, Performance benchmarking, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Also tagged , , , , , , , ,

Check out the other XPRTs:

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