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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%

#301

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.

I don't think you really want websites to make this determination anyway. There are a million reasons why a user might want a website to use fewer resources than their machine could support.

It should just be a setting the user can select. No probing of the machine necessary.

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

#302
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay the same amount for a Linux laptop that worked as easily as a MBP and had similar build quality, performance and battery life. Howver, whatever crazy-stable and easy to use and well supported hypothetical Linux this is wouldn’t be compatible with my “real” Linux use cases so I would then also install Arch or whatever and live with constantly borked everything and just swap between my Arch “Dev” OS and my…

Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years. Stable ?? Linux is a rock of stability, you must mean something else.

Yeah I’m talking about Ubuntu being hyper aggressive about upgrading my GPU drivers even after I turn off all auto updates and borking my entire OS install and this happening enough that it’s faster just to make scripts which auto reinstall Ubuntu and all my versioned packages from scratch.

Or non-Ubuntu, software just randomly falling apart after 2 years. Like I need a newer kernel for a new Wi-Fi card but then I need a different GPU driver and that’s incompatible with some softwares UI library, so they update that but it has an incompatibility with something else.

Or how Linux still has Wi-Fi 6 totally broken.

Sure, Linux is rock stable if you have a production environment where everything is nailed down. But from an actual daily consumer user point of view it doesn’t feel stable. At all.

I love Linux. I love fixing it when it borks. But my god does it break every week.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not in the general settings - instead it's in the setting menu in the video player itself, where you'd select the quality and playback speed, etc.

its not there for me. I dont see it in any settings anywhere.

Is Dark Mode in either your OS or Youtube turned on? It's not an option unless you're in DM.

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

#304
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a Macbook because my dedicated Linux laptop, made by a popular Linux-only manufacturer, had so many issues that I got tired of diagnosing. I love Linux, but it's not a panacea for every computer issue under the sun, just a few of them. I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it,…

I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about. My fan went, but likely it was a pet fur issue, and easy to fix... I'm not an admin. I know how to use the command line, and how to use it as a work machine. Really my experience over the past 3 years, its been as trouble free as my Mac used to be. It really is th…

> I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about.

What's your machine+distro?

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for those unfamiliar with visualizing a doughnut, imagine a bagel-shaped treat of sweet cake-like dough, deep-fried and frosted, with optional sprinkles

What's a bagel?

A bagel is a first-degree pretzel.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont have that option. firefox on windows 10.

only shows up when in 'dark mode'.

that is some amazingly crap UX. who the hell thought this was a good idea?

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

#308
post #245
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a Macbook because my dedicated Linux laptop, made by a popular Linux-only manufacturer, had so many issues that I got tired of diagnosing. I love Linux, but it's not a panacea for every computer issue under the sun, just a few of them. I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it,…

With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop. Hammerspoon gets me drag and resize windows how I want, and there's Rectangle.app for tiling-ish window management. There's no /proc, and all the rest of the cli utilities are just wrong (netstat, route, top, etc) but I can live with my M1. (brew addresses a lot of the issues though, ev…

> With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop.

One problem that I have is all that all those mods and add-ons are out there, but there's a real mindset that "everything must be an app" and a pursuant mindset that "might as well charge for it". I don't mind paying for a complicated app, but there are certain basic features that used to be served by the freeware model on Macs that just aren't any more, and my impression is that things are heading ever more in that direction. (As well as in the direction of subscriptions over app purchases, which are right out for me for basic utility needs.)

You mentioned Rectangle.app and Hammerspoon, which are both open source. Do you have any good recommendations for where to look for other high-quality open-source mods and add-ons for macOS?

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

#309
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay the same amount for a Linux laptop that worked as easily as a MBP and had similar build quality, performance and battery life. Howver, whatever crazy-stable and easy to use and well supported hypothetical Linux this is wouldn’t be compatible with my “real” Linux use cases so I would then also install Arch or whatever and live with constantly borked everything and just swap between my Arch “Dev” OS and my…

Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years. Stable ?? Linux is a rock of stability, you must mean something else.

Just today I needed to run some software only available in .deb and only on Ubuntu 22.04. So whipped out an old laptop that had Ubuntu installed and ran sudo do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 22.04. boom! GUI gone and the terminal was flooded with weird filesystem errors. I had to spend the whole afternoon reinstalling from scratch.

I would love a Linux daily driver but I've had similar experiences to the above every time I've tried it for the last 15 years.

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

#310
post #13
post #9

That'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.

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.

> arbitrary software

Windows Defender isn't "arbitrary software" - it's built into the OS and enabled by default. To anyone building an application for Windows, it should be considered part of the platform.

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