I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
21–30 of 443 posts
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#22That's one way to look at it, but a very biased take. An equally valid take is that Firefox was calling an expensive platform feature too often, and even though it has been killing performance for years (possibly, for the entire history of the project) nobody noticed or bothered to fix it on the application side.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#23I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
Have you any semblance of proof of this? By the looks of it took Firefox a few years to figure out what the repro was, they reported it to MS, it was (very) promptly fixed and they were warned that the syscall they were using isn't being used as intended and they should consider changes to FF for future use cases.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#24That's one way to look at it, but a very biased take. An equally valid take is that Firefox was calling an expensive platform feature too often, and even though it has been killing performance for years (possibly, for the entire history of the project) nobody noticed or bothered to fix it on the application side.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#25I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
It is amusing that anyone thinks a company with > 200K employees and probably 10K products is organized enough for something like this.
Microsoft has a storied history of anti-competitive views leaking to public eyes/ears, something like this is quite literally a matter of not organizing anyone.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The platform feature in question was normally cheap and just made artificially expensive by Defender intercepting calls to it and blocking until analysis was performed. I don't think it's the FireFox' team's responsibility to be aware of and take into account arbitrary software intercepting system calls.
> I don't think it's the FireFox' team's responsibility to be aware of and take into account arbitrary software intercepting system calls. Per the bug report, Firefox was generating up to ~14,000 calls where Chrome was generating ~300, though. Surely it is Firefox' team's responsibility to use system calls in a sane way, say not almost 50x more than the competition?
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#27That's one way to look at it, but a very biased take. An equally valid take is that Firefox was calling an expensive platform feature too often, and even though it has been killing performance for years (possibly, for the entire history of the project) nobody noticed or bothered to fix it on the application side.
Also worth noting that the "expensive platform feature" you refer to in this specific case means "writing to a file". Something as basic as this should be assumed to be fast on modern operating systems.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#28That's one way to look at it, but a very biased take. An equally valid take is that Firefox was calling an expensive platform feature too often, and even though it has been killing performance for years (possibly, for the entire history of the project) nobody noticed or bothered to fix it on the application side.
Also worth noting that the "expensive platform feature" you refer to in this specific case means "writing to a file". Something as basic as this should be assumed to be fast on modern operating systems.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#29What apps other than Firefox might this have affected that badly (75% CPU usage)?
Newer versions of Thunderbird have been rendered completely unusable unless I exclude %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Thunderbird from real-time scans.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#30I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.