We’re excited to see continued growth in the number of tech press outlets, OEM labs, and independent testers that have added WebXPRT 5 to their suite of go-to benchmark tools for hardware analysis. We know that for tech enthusiasts who invest significant time in carefully evaluating new gear, the decision to use WebXPRT 5 reflects a high degree of confidence in the benchmark’s relevance in a rapidly changing tech marketplace.

For many WebXPRT users, WebXPRT 5 adoption is also the natural evolution of years of reliable WebXPRT 4 testing. WebXPRT 4 has been phenomenally successful, with over 725,000 completed test runs to date. While we love WebXPRT 4 and are grateful to have earned the trust of so many users, WebXPRT 5 is the future of cross-platform browser performance benchmarking in the AI age. At a glance, it may seem like WebXPRT 5 is simply a version of WebXPRT 4 with an updated UI and rescaled scoring. Dig deeper, though, and you’ll see that WebXPRT 5 represents a significant upgrade from WebXPRT 4—one that is well-positioned for the future.

If you haven’t yet shifted your testing from WebXPRT 4 to WebXPRT 5, there are several key reasons why we think it makes a lot of sense to go ahead and make the remarkably easy and pain-free transition.

WebXPRT 5 offers more AI workloads, with full transparency

We added more timed AI tasks with WebXPRT 5, along with the kind of technical transparency that’s vital for in-depth performance analysis or defending test methodologies in published collateral. Four of WebXPRT 5’s seven workloads utilize AI capabilities, and we provide detailed information about the workloads’ actual models and runtimes: Video Background Blur uses an ONNX human-segmentation model with OpenCV.js (WASM); Detect Faces uses a ResNet-based Caffe model; Image Classification uses SqueezeNet v1.0 on ImageNet images; and Document Scan uses tesseract.js v6.0.1 OCR with LSTM. WebXPRT’s ability to measure how well devices handle those types of workloads has significant value and relevance for modern performance analysis.

We also offer free access to the WebXPRT 5 source code, so you don’t have to take our word for how everything works. You can look under the hood to your heart’s content.

WebXPRT 5 provides updated, higher-resolution content and longer operations

With WebXPRT 5, we updated much of the benchmark’s workload content to reflect changes in everyday technology, such as upgrading most photos in the photo-processing workloads to higher resolutions. One example is the Photo Effects workload, which now applies an Emboss filter to photos with resolutions up to 4928 x 3264. Higher-resolution inputs both reflect today’s better phone (and other) digital cameras and can stress modern devices more meaningfully, reducing score compression at the top of the range.

In addition, many of WebXPRT 4’s existing workloads no longer challenge cutting-edge consumer hardware as much as many of us would like. Testing labs recognized this and asked us for longer and more demanding workloads. We developed workloads for WebXPRT 5 that are accessible enough that you can run them on a broad range of devices yet challenging enough to allow performance differentiation among high-end systems.

You can directly compare your results to those from major tech press outlets

Several global tech press outlets have already transitioned to testing with WebXPRT 5 or are in the process of doing so, including PCMag, Notebookcheck, ComputerBase (Germany), XFastest (Taiwan), eTeknix, BenchLife.info, and ITC.ua (Ukraine). As the hardware review industry shifts to WebXPRT 5 for browser performance evaluation in the age of AI, it makes sense to test the newest gear with the newest tests and have the ability to quickly compare your results to thousands of others.

Even more WebXPRT 5 AI is on the way!

In past blog posts, we’ve discussed our goal of developing one or more experimental WebXPRT workloads. Experimental workloads are optional, and their scores stay separate from the main overall score, so we can add or adjust the tests without affecting comparability. The experimental workload approach gives us the flexibility to put cutting-edge measurement tools in your hands—even if those tools won’t yet run on every platform that supports the main WebXPRT tests. This setup is especially well-suited for the whirlwind of change and technological advancement that we’re seeing with AI.

For instance, there’s a real need for tests that target local, browser-based AI workloads like LLM inference. As the foundational technologies of Web AI mature—such as WebGPU and eventually WebNN—we can work on developing those types of workloads and adding them as experiments without inconveniencing existing WebXPRT 5 users.

Though we are actively working on experimental AI workloads, we’re not yet ready to share details here in the blog—but we are very excited about what’s to come! If you make the transition to testing with WebXPRT 5, you’re going to have access to pioneering experimental workloads right out of the gate—workloads that won’t be available with any other browser performance benchmark.

If you’ve been interested in WebXPRT 5 but you haven’t yet made the switch, we hope this blog post will encourage you to give it a try.

If you have any questions or comments about the differences between WebXPRT 4 and WebXPRT 5, please let us know!

Justin