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Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#41

Post by [deleted] »

jupp0r wrote: post #26
vntok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Did you read the bug report? This is literally about writing to files in a temp folder. Surely you can optimize that but you should also be able to assume that this does not use excessive amounts of CPU on a modern operating system.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#42

Post by uoaei »

stalfosknight wrote: post #17
gtop3 wrote: post #3

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.

Do we have to assume negative intent every time something like this happens?

We should at least be aware of it as an option. Many call this "healthy skepticism". It becomes unhealthy when you veer into blind optimism/pessimism/cynicism.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#43

Post by uoaei »

jupp0r wrote: post #16
29athrowaway wrote: post #10

[flagged]

You'd think they'd target Chrome (>60% market share on Desktop) rather than Firefox with < 8% market share.

The new Edge browser is basically a revamped Chromium, so that'd be a pretty dumb move.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#44

Post by _8j50 »

whalesalad wrote: post #39

My only interaction with Windows Defender is the (undefeatable) nag popup every boot that warns me it is disabled.

Haha, you should enable it with exclusions. It's the best AV out there that isn't an EDR. I disable it in labs but I can't imagine running windows in prod with defender enabled. Don't use windows like it's Linux.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#45

Post by chillstreem »

arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

doesn't this bug only manifest itself if one is using microsoft defender as their only security solution, and not a 3rd party AV/IS? if so, then the number of Firefox users in this calculation is much lower.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#46

Post by recursive »

arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

The units don't make sense. You might mean megawatt-hours?

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#47

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

You assume all Firefox users are on Windows (they're not) and that all Firefox users on Windows are affected (I and my SO were not).

Who knows what edge case triggered that bug to manifest but I for one haven't seen it in the wild in the years we've been using FF.

Probably difficult in such a large org to allocate dev resources to chase down and fix a bug few people were impacted by.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#48

Post by maccard »

xutopia wrote: post #36
maccard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've lived through the browser wars and I can tell you that this would not surprise me one bit.

There's a difference between something not surprising you and a wild, totally baseless accusation. Ill happily eat my words if there is a shred of proof, but right now it's "company fixes old bug when it was reported to them"

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#49

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

chillstreem wrote: post #45
arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

doesn't this bug only manifest itself if one is using microsoft defender as their only security solution, and not a 3rd party AV/IS? if so, then the number of Firefox users in this calculation is much lower.

I don't know if that's the case. I'm a Firefox user but consider all the 3rd party apps nearly as much malware as the things they are trying to solve. I run strictly defender and try to make good choices when downloading and browsing.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#50

Post by pjmlp »

arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

If it isn't on the Sprint board it doesn't exist.
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