I had (potentially incorrectly) hoped that 8.1 Workstation would have better performance than the web browser version we had been using on our HMIs. After upgrading I can see and was able to video tape about a 1-2 second slower loading time on some screens when using workstation compared to the same application running in Chrome on the same hardware. It did seem that the embedded views we are inheriting from a parent project were considerably slower.
On the positive and unexpected side the browser performance seems to be better after the upgrade.
Just curious if there is a known/expected performance difference between workstation and browser before we decide which route to stick with.
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No, they’re more or less the same.
Workstation is just an embedded Chromium engine with an application shell we control that lets us do things like Kiosk mode, access the filesystem, allow links to be opened or not, access sensor data, etc…
I’d like to add that the appearance of the application in workstation is slightly different than Chrome as well. It is less sharp (more blurry) and there are some small margin or padding differences. 8.1rc3.
I wonder if those things are just due to Workstation using an older version of Chromium or if something else is going on 
Is there any update on any of this?
We’ve enabled hardware rendering for the embedded chromium engine in Perspective Workstation in 8.1.2. That should put it on more or less on par with the browser.
Workstation appears to work the same now (maybe even slightly faster, but don’t quote me on that) now that we’ve installed from 8.1.2.
I did notice that when I first open a project, however, it is still slightly blurry. Borders on buttons seem a pixel or two wider as well in Workstation. I was wondering if the resolution on the computer was causing issues so I changed that to a larger resolution and voila, it was clear, just like in Chrome. Then I switched back to the resolution I had been using and it was still clear, so just being in that resolution didn’t seem to be an issue. If I start the application in either resolution the issue occurs where it is blurry.
I did a little testing and it appears that the difference in appearance (blurry and the larger borders) occurs when the windows scaling is set to 125%. It may occur on other non 100% values as well, but this is the only one I tried due to the way our application is set up at the moment. I noticed a few other small nuance like position of text in tables, but they aren’t as big of a deal. The blurry-ness is the biggest issue visually.