Firefox-related CPU use is only reduced by 75% when this bug is caused. NOT in the general case as this title implies
Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
131–140 of 443 posts
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also have to assume that at least one Microsoft employee has Firefox installed. There's no bug if there's no users
I work at MS, tried to use Firefox but couldn't because FF doesn't integrate with the Windows cert store. Crucially, this keeps Windows Hello (TPM auth) from working, which makes it useless for any internal websites. For a while I used a hand-compiled PKCS#12 plugin that bridged to the cert store, but that was extremely fragile and eventually I gave up. I think this is probably a major blocker for many enterprise use…
Current MS employee here. For a time this was true, but FF recently added this integration. No about:config needed, there’s simply a checkbox under the FF security settings. Since this was added, I have gone back to using FF as my daily driver, and I haven’t really encountered any other friction.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coal makes only 12% of the electricity, in the US at least. Natural gas makes 36% and oil makes 33%. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
What does that have to do with anything? "Coal plant" is being used as a unit of power here.
And a unit of pollution. I'm sure that one extra solar plant or hydro plant wouldn't draw as much attention.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#134Quick 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.
> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
> Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#135Quick 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.
> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
Or the energy used by all the electron apps on all operation systems.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#136Quick 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 run an antivirus suite and have attempted to turn Defender off several times. Windows Update keeps switching it back on.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#137What apps other than Firefox might this have affected that badly (75% CPU usage)?
I would think anything with a JIT that is toggling the page protection for machine code many times a second, based on a very quick reading of the bug report talking about VirtualProtect calls and the processing of ETW events for them by defender.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#138> mpengine.dll version 1.1.20200.4 was released on April 4, so the fix should be available for everybody now. See the end of comment 91 to know what version you are using. Also, the latest discoveries in bug 1822650 comment 6 suggest that we can go even further down in CPU usage, with all antivirus software this time, not just Windows Defender. Really nice to see open collaboration between Mozilla and Microsoft devel…
Well, a net improvement for the people who paid Microsoft for an OS that wasted their energy and wore down their computer (heat damage) for 5 years.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love calculations like this and hope they are part of every engineer’s line of thinking. I originally came across this thinking in Andy Hertzfeld’s book - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt Performance is time, energy, heat. It’s one of the easiest features to get and there are lots of tools, research, and philosophies to help get it. Memory and storage are similar. For anyone working on l…
How did the idea of avoiding premature optimization get misapplied to client-side apps where the entity writing the software is not the one paying for electricity, cooling, and people's time when the software takes much longer to run than it could? When did a lot of software devs stop caring? Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.
Premature optimization should be avoided client side as well I imagine? It just seems like lots of development shops skip optimization altogether, even when it stops being Premature (when it matures?).
And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#140Quick 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.
> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
There are good reasons to not use chrome over firefox, but few reasons to leave firefox bugged. I don’t think the same utilitarian logic applies.