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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%

#181

Post by warent »

bee_rider wrote: post #174
asvitkine wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save a search: "Ambient mode uses a lighting effect to make watching videos in Dark theme more immersive, by casting gentle colors from the video, into your screen's background."

Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default?

This seems unnecessarily passive aggressive. Everyone makes mistakes or bugs, intern or not. It makes no sense to get this salty about basic human error. Also there's nothing wrong with implementing minor UX enhancements.

If anything redirect the frustration to the leadership that doesn't prioritize fixing these kinds of errors.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

tablespoon wrote: post #179
bee_rider wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default?

> Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default? Total speculation, but Firefox seems to be pushing out a lot of UI gimmicks. Maybe they're trying to drum up interest in the browser that way, since they seem intent on killing many of their other differentiators.

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by Georgelemental »

tablespoon wrote: post #179
bee_rider wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default?

> Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default? Total speculation, but Firefox seems to be pushing out a lot of UI gimmicks. Maybe they're trying to drum up interest in the browser that way, since they seem intent on killing many of their other differentiators.

This is a YouTube feature, not a Firefox one.

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

#184

Post by Georgelemental »

dist-epoch wrote: post #120
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.

> 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.

If one user switches to Chrome, the energy savings are only for that one user. If one Microsoft engineer fixes a bug, the energy savings are for the many thousands who use Firefox on up-to-date Windows.

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

#185

Post by zerkten »

harshreality wrote: post #106
jonhohle wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

>> When did a lot of software devs stop caring?

I'm not sure the devs stopped caring as much as the powers at be. Software development has become more commoditized than we want to believe. Devs following an agile workflow with every intent of performing multiple rounds of optimization find that the product gets shipped as soon as it approximates the thing that had been conceived originally.

It doesn't look like an immediate failure, so the less that leadership takes from it is frequently that the level of maturity they shipped is safe. The cycle continues and eventually folks lower down succumb to this shipping pattern. The only things that get them to optimize is competition that successfully drive home their win was due to performance. This doesn't always lead to optimizations when you are an incumbent who can still close more feature gaps because those often result in higher sales and revenue.

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

#186

Post by gruez »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #148
dist-epoch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The cause and effect exists whether or not some commenter on HN writes about it. The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.

>The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.

You're right in principle, but in practice even factoring in externalities electricity prices won't be high enough for people to care. Using current US carbon intensity for electricity generation[1] and the higher end estimates for the social cost of carbon[2] gets us carbon costs of $0.142 per kWh. The average prices in US is $0.168. Adding in carbon costs would almost double the price, but there are countries with even higher electricity prices[4] and they're not exactly switching to more efficient software in droves to save energy.

[1] https://emissionsindex.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Carbon_p...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

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

#188

Post by Karunamon »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #134
dist-epoch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is that because of the quality of Chrome or because Safari is a "blessed" application and probably gets to do things other applications do not?

Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.

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

#189

Post by kramerger »

dist-epoch wrote: post #120
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.

> 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.

> imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.

Nah, I like my privacy. How about replacing Electron apps with native apps instead?

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