Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bugzilla.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 443 posts

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

#221

Post by xxs »

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.

>Firefox users switched to Chrome.

Far worse due to privacy/adblock addons.

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

#222

Post by wiseowise »

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.

> Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.

Enlighten us.

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

#223

Post by Tagbert »

cronix wrote: post #143

If you're on a Mac and using FF (probably not FF specific), turning off "ambient mode" in youtube can save 30% cpu. I just found this out while searching why FF was taking 90% of my cpu while watching youtube videos in normal mode, but went down to 40% use if viewing in full screen. Turns out that this youtube "ambient mode" was the culprit. My lap is now cooler and the fan doesn't turn on anymore. I wonder how much…

Where is that setting? In YouTube Settings? I don't see it, there.

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

#224

Post by toenailtag »

somid3 wrote: post #187

Conspiracy theory — could this have been done on purpose for browser share dominance purposes?

I would bet it is more likely that MS devs noticed but just didn't care. The farthest it would have gotten in conversation with QA triage would have been "does this issue affect any of our services? Ok then that is Mozilla's problem."

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

#225

Post by revolvingocelot »

tyingq wrote: post #216
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.

Maybe compare manifest v2 friendly Firefox with uBlock Origin vs eventual Chrome without it :)

Serious savings indeed when the Javascript cryptominer some ad network blithely serves up is ad-blocker'd, but we prefer synthetic benchmarks.

In seriousness, though, this is an issue. Elsewhere, I observe arguments about eg userbenchmark rankings, and the comparative relevance of single-core vs multicore performance. Are you playing a game, or rendering video 24/7 -- or running some entirely synthetic workload that allows for a peak performance the real world would never achieve? Same kinda problem.

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

#226

Post by simlevesque »

tempestn wrote: post #219
alluro2 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any error to fix. It's a feature - casting light from the video onto the UI, using JS, surely takes that amount of CPU. The question of why it is on by default stands - because it's little bit of eye candy, vs people's laptop batteries, CPU that could have been used to get other stuff done faster - so also their time, device thermals etc... I don't think it's just unnecessarily salty to point ou…

How much can websites determine about the power of the device they're running on? Obviously it'd be a security issue for them to know too much, but it would be nice to be able to progressively enhance the experience for more powerful devices that can handle it, beyond just mobile vs PC. Even just knowing whether a device was running off battery power could be useful.

Here's what's available, requires permissions:

- BatteryManager.charging

- BatteryManager.chargingTime

- BatteryManager.dischargingTime

- BatteryManager.level

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/BatteryMana...

https://caniuse.com/?search=BatteryManager

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

#227

Post by wslh »

cronix wrote: post #143

If you're on a Mac and using FF (probably not FF specific), turning off "ambient mode" in youtube can save 30% cpu. I just found this out while searching why FF was taking 90% of my cpu while watching youtube videos in normal mode, but went down to 40% use if viewing in full screen. Turns out that this youtube "ambient mode" was the culprit. My lap is now cooler and the fan doesn't turn on anymore. I wonder how much…

I think it is time to have a way to fine tune consumption based on settings. I assume the less complex way to do this is, really, use the telemetry information gathered.

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

#228

Post by rejectfinite »

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?

I really like it!

Then again, I am using a real computer and not a toy.

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

#229

Post by xen2xen1 »

DevKoala wrote: post #164
winter_blue wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the myriad reasons why I have a strong preference for Linux.

Something happens > This is one of the myriad reasons why I have a strong preference for Linux.

Because browser users on Linux have never, ever been shafted by a browser bug? Riiiiiight.

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

#230

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

hgsgm wrote: post #142
thfuran wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually assume that even vaguely considering looking in the same direction as a file on windows will melt my CPU.

Windows Search Indexer automates that for me. CPU keeps burning even when monitor is off and I'm working on another computer.

Why is Search Indexer constantly rescanning the same files? Can they not cache the results from the previous scan? That and OneDrive are constantly making my work laptop scream.
Post reply on HN